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Keygen music
February 22nd, 2018
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I listened to Solderpunk's awesome new anonradio show, Half Hour
of Power, which was a fantastic assortment of chiptunes. I had
forgotten how fun chiptunes can be and I'd also forgotten about
a similar school of music that I used to be really into, Keygen
Music!
First, some background for those of you not immediately familiar
with the concept. When downloading illegal software you often have
to find a crack or serial number to use it. Most software that
requires registration uses some mathematical and programatic
method to validate the serial number that you enter. Fantastically
brilliant coders will use special software to freeze the operation
of the program and step through its assembly operations in order
to discover what these validation mechanisms are.
If they are amazing enough, they can write a small patch to the
executable that will bypass or falsely validate a serial number as
valid. The patch literally rewrites the machine code to "JMP" past
the validation to a success area in memory. That's a crack!
If the coder is ever more amazing and sly, rather than changing
the application--like a crack--they'll write their own program
that can create a valid serial number by working backwards. If
they can decypher how a program is validated, they can create
a successful string of data. This is a keygen, and in my opinion
some of the most sophisticated and beautiful demonstrations of
code in existence.
I don't know when keygens started adding music to their little
programs, but the popularity quickly took off. Interestingly, the
music used for keygens often used the same technologies and
formats as game chiptunes: MOD, XM, or S3M [0] for example. These
tracker formats have some amazing, unique sounds and offer quite
a bit of control for their musicians.
As the years went by, I've saved my favorite tunes, often by
ripping them from the keygens themselves. I like to think of the
act of "cracking" a keygen as a kind of computer nerd poetry.
Also, the music is awesome.
If you want to try out some keygen music for yourself, it's much
easier these days. There's a great site that archives so much of
the scene's music [1]. If you want to listen to my personal keygen
music mix, grab the rar of my archive here [2]
Perhaps I should have made an anonradio show of it myself, but
I'd rather share it secretly with all you foxy gophers.
[0] S3M format
[1] Keygen Music
[2] Tomasino's Keygen Mix
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