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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 |