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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