GDI Effects from the PC cracking scene • Hacker News Board

Re: GDI Effects from the PC cracking scene

#41

Post by effekt » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 4:09 AM UTC

Fnoord wrote: post #8

mavamaarten wrote: post #5

I absolutely adored the little intro that Razor1911 added to their crack of GTA IV. Cool graphics, nice jingle, short, to the point. https://youtu.be/htbDeD-wv7s Also not entirely related (kinda?), but I also regularly listen to the music that was inside the Digital Insanity keygen for Sony Vegas. https://youtu.be/kJln_F7Y2P4 Nostalgia!

> Nostalgia! Maktone [1] did some very nice chiptunes for Razor [2] [3]. This playlist [4] has a lot of good Razor ones, I bet someone was looking for [5] =] Also, a lot of keygens didn't have to be used back when a simple hexedit of one value could validate the software. I remember that being the case for mIRC. And Sublime Text. I mean, it could be as simple as changing an if statement to if not. I use the same idea…

He's still alive and well! While he's not super active and let his website(s) die, you can follow him on Facebook where he generally seems the most active these days: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063887643279&ref=...

And instead of YT/archive (though, shoutout to textfiles.com, which is now part of archive), https://www.pouet.net/ and https://scene.org/ is still where things are generally at

Re: GDI Effects from the PC cracking scene

#42

Post by effekt » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 4:15 AM UTC

vintagedave wrote: post #17

For all those effects: is their source available? I see EXE names and I think cracks were distributed that way. I don’t have enough insight into the cracking scene to know if there was any underground open source back then. These days, having the source to these graphic effects would be invaluable!

As for cracktros, probably not. I should spelunk through backups. However, the most technical and competitive people generally transitioned to the demoscene in the early 2000s and that scene is far more open.

You can find a lot of groups/individuals publish a lot of esp. their older stuff now.

Two off the top of my head:

- https://github.com/ConspiracyHu (and they made a W32 port of Future Crew's Second Reality, which is public domain: https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality)

- Farbrausch published their original demo tool source ages ago: https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public

Re: GDI Effects from the PC cracking scene

#43

Post by reactordev » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 11:20 AM UTC

vardump wrote: post #36

reactordev wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>”There were a lot of MOD player libraries” What the hell do you think I’m talking about? I’m done arguing at a brick wall. You basically just validated what I said and yet continue to say I’m wrong. We embedded the music. We needed to play the music. Windows only supoorts PCM and MIDI at the time. Pick one.

You can't render MOD songs to MIDI. Not even with modern AI. Obviously the MOD libraries outputted PCM to WinMM. That's the job of the MOD library. You're arguing with someone who was actually writing Windows (and DOS if it matters) applications in C/C++/asm the early nineties. If you really wanted MIDI, the best option in the nineties would have been just to include the original MIDI data. You could of course also g…

Good talk

Re: GDI Effects from the PC cracking scene

#44

Post by ValdikSS » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 11:41 AM UTC

mavamaarten wrote: post #5

I absolutely adored the little intro that Razor1911 added to their crack of GTA IV. Cool graphics, nice jingle, short, to the point. https://youtu.be/htbDeD-wv7s Also not entirely related (kinda?), but I also regularly listen to the music that was inside the Digital Insanity keygen for Sony Vegas. https://youtu.be/kJln_F7Y2P4 Nostalgia!

Funny enough, that Digital Insanity tune was just an embedded .mp3, which was considered very low-key for the time—it greatly enlarged the .exe size compared to the chiptunes.

Re: GDI Effects from the PC cracking scene

#45

Post by z500 » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 1:30 PM UTC

self_awareness wrote: post #12

bob1029 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Win32 is definitely not a lost art. It's more accessible than ever with modern code generation tools like cswin32. This inspiration to build things that look like this is what has been lost.

If today's programmers need code generation tools to use what teenagers could use on their own back in the day, then it truly is a lost art.

Is it a lost art or does nobody do it more than they have to because it was always such bear?

Re: GDI Effects from the PC cracking scene

#46

Post by breakingcups » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 3:15 PM UTC

z500 wrote: post #45

self_awareness wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If today's programmers need code generation tools to use what teenagers could use on their own back in the day, then it truly is a lost art.

Is it a lost art or does nobody do it more than they have to because it was always such bear?

Those aren't mutually exclusive

Re: GDI Effects from the PC cracking scene

#47

Post by jitander » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 3:50 PM UTC

Jitu

Re: GDI Effects from the PC cracking scene

#48

Post by self_awareness » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 4:21 PM UTC

z500 wrote: post #45

self_awareness wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If today's programmers need code generation tools to use what teenagers could use on their own back in the day, then it truly is a lost art.

Is it a lost art or does nobody do it more than they have to because it was always such bear?

Definitely a lost art.

It's not all about WinAPI, it's about the approach.

Today's approach is "let me use electron for GUI and python backend for my bitcoin monitoring app because it's convenient for me". This results in bundling 1 GB of code for a trivial project which is a pain to use.

And the "legacy" approach is "let me use masm32 and winapi because it will be enough".

Re: GDI Effects from the PC cracking scene

#49

Post by TazeTSchnitzel » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 2:12 PM UTC

vardump wrote: post #36

reactordev wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>”There were a lot of MOD player libraries” What the hell do you think I’m talking about? I’m done arguing at a brick wall. You basically just validated what I said and yet continue to say I’m wrong. We embedded the music. We needed to play the music. Windows only supoorts PCM and MIDI at the time. Pick one.

You can't render MOD songs to MIDI. Not even with modern AI. Obviously the MOD libraries outputted PCM to WinMM. That's the job of the MOD library. You're arguing with someone who was actually writing Windows (and DOS if it matters) applications in C/C++/asm the early nineties. If you really wanted MIDI, the best option in the nineties would have been just to include the original MIDI data. You could of course also g…

> You can't render MOD songs to MIDI.

Sure you can, both are sequenced music formats, and if you can control the set of samples used to play back the MIDI (which Windows provides APIs for!) you can get it to sound right.

You've gotten yourself into a silly argument here. You're correct that one obvious way to play back a tracker module would be to embed a library that synthesises PCM. But Windows does ship with a MIDI playback engine that allows loading custom sounds. There is nothing unreasonable about converting a tracker module into a combination of a MIDI sequence and a custom DLS bank and then using DirectMusic to play it back.