[HN Gopher] GDI Effects from the PC cracking scene
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GDI Effects from the PC cracking scene
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 148 points
Date : 2025-12-29 19:10 UTC (6 days ago)
(HTM) web link (gdimayhem.temari.fr)
(TXT) w3m dump (gdimayhem.temari.fr)
| self_awareness wrote:
| A lot of those were written in assembly by teenagers, using
| WinAPI directly. Yet they still run on Win10/Win11. A lost art.
| throwfaraway135 wrote:
| Thematically, many of them resemble the kind of WordArt we used
| to make as children in MS Word.
| bob1029 wrote:
| 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.
| self_awareness wrote:
| 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.
| anaisbetts wrote:
| The code generator just recreates the C header files in C#,
| let's not be dramatic.
| yonisto wrote:
| Do you know where I can find source code for such intros?
| CyMonk wrote:
| e.g. on this very site.
|
| https://gdimayhem.temari.fr/index.php?p=datas
| reactordev wrote:
| It wasn't all assembly (though those were the popular ones),
| heavy C use too. What really changed the game was when DirectX
| came.
| m00dy wrote:
| If you're familiar with these concepts, Deepwalker's intro [0] is
| heavily inspired by the HOODLUM GTA5 demoscene :)
|
| [0]: https://deepwalker.xyz
| mavamaarten wrote:
| 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!
| Fnoord wrote:
| > 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 for Proxmox. It is quick and dirty,
| but not the way the code was intended. If you wanna go that
| route, a keygen is the way (a serial does the job). With crack,
| you never know what it does, same goes for keygen (wrt
| malware). I still love Serials 2000. A program which had all
| the keys and serials in existence. Which was a big feat back in
| the end of '90s when search engines were shit. It even had
| regular updates/patches.
|
| As for the website. Screenshots don't show videos.
|
| [1] https://archive.org/details/all_20240526
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mwO26qel2U
|
| [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI46EyzaKI8
|
| [4] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5CC3A42488052F20
|
| [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K32PLx21Bi0
| stevekemp wrote:
| > A program which had all the keys and serials in existence.
|
| That sounds useful! Back in the day reversing was fun, and
| I'd rather do it myself than risk downloading malware.
|
| That said I'll never forget the name of astalavista.box.sk -
| which was sometimes used for reference, and +fravia for
| giving guidance to the beginners.
| panki27 wrote:
| I have exactly the same Sony Vegas keygen experience as the
| parent poster, but with the song from your fifth link!
| jtvjan wrote:
| Maktone is so good! I remember hearing one of their songs in
| a GBA intro[1] and it still gets stuck in my head
| sometimes...
|
| [1]: https://youtu.be/CGaqlSIUSEo
| ryandrake wrote:
| Website pretty much unusable on Mac/Safari: The viewport is so
| wide my browser shows about 1/4 of the horizontal content
| requiring constant horizontal scrolling. Firefox is better, but
| still requires horizontal scrolling to see the whole page.
| monerozcash wrote:
| Refreshing the page fixed that for me on Safari.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Yea, I tried that, and it does fix it initially, but as you
| scroll through the content, the site decides to resize its
| canvas all by itself, to the point where you have a giant
| horizontal canvas again soon. Why do web developers have to
| do this stuff?
| stavros wrote:
| Oh man, the nostalgia of buying magazines that came with
| shareware CDs (we didn't have the internet back then where I
| lived) and going to a net cafe for half an hour to download
| cracks, because we obviously didn't have any way to either
| procure or send USD half way around the world...
|
| It was a magical time mostly because computers were full of
| possibilities. Someone gave me a CD with Visual Basic 4 and I
| figured out programming just from reading the help files. I still
| have no idea how I managed to stumble my way through to actually
| making real programs.
| shoobiedoo wrote:
| It really was magical. It felt like the wild west. I used to
| buy a copy of 2600 and sit in a cafe reading it just feeling
| like I could do anything or go anywhere, which I guess I could
| to a degree back in those days.
|
| I left my system administration position in the 2010s because
| it brought back none of anything remotely close to those vibes.
| Staring at a cloud admin panel in a website all day made me
| start to hate computers. It was then I realized it was always
| just going to be a hobby if I wanted to keep it the way I
| remembered. Fine by me
| stavros wrote:
| Exactly, it really did feel like the wild west, and in the
| best way. All the sites were quirky and personal, not a
| company in sight. It really felt amazing to discover
| someone's little personalized corner on _every single site_.
| 123pie123 wrote:
| I moved away from SysAdmin around 2010 and I worked with a
| fair amount of other techies and it really was the wild west
| in the stuff various people did with: sizeable production
| systems, Firewall rules (or lack of) network connectivity/
| switches, and code changes
|
| Get a cool tool from a magazine? yep just throw it on to
| production servers - no testing or letting people know what
| the hell they did (I got burnt a few times from people doing
| this!)
|
| no change control, no documentation - just reverse the
| changes, if it doesn't work immediately - although some
| people never even made back ups of the previous files - crazy
| shit
| HPsquared wrote:
| Most satisfying is to leverage computers as part of another
| job like engineering or management or whatever, where you are
| able to get creative and hack something together under your
| own control. Then you can use them as you please and they are
| strictly positive. Actual IT specialists get all the non fun
| jobs that are deep inside the machine.
| overgard wrote:
| Funny to think how useful help files and manuals used to be! I
| learned QBasic mostly from the builtin help system, VBasic
| mostly from clicking around, and even DirectX from the help
| files and tutorials. Nowadays documentation is outsourced to
| the community it seems, for the most part.
| stavros wrote:
| Yeah, VB4 had tutorials on how to make simple apps, and
| that's how I learned to program! I can't believe I learned
| about loops and variables and control flow structures by just
| reading the documentation.
| reactordev wrote:
| What made these fun to make was the fact that some really smart
| people put a lot of time and effort into making a library that
| will allow you to play midi, "skin" windows HWND surfaces, co-
| routines, and a high level abstraction over win32 functions. Man,
| those were the days. These could be cranked out in a matter of
| hours for any new software as much of the market used the same
| few vendors or algorithms very similar.
|
| We didn't know what we know today and so every turn felt like a
| discovery.
| vardump wrote:
| I think most played Protracker, XM, S3M, IT, etc. _modules_ ,
| not MIDI. They typically used very short samples, a style which
| was called a 'chiptune', songs that were made sound like they
| came from some eighties microcomputer.
|
| More recently the definition of 'chiptune' shifted to
| specifically mean music from 8-bit sound chips.
| reactordev wrote:
| You're talking about the songs. I know what a chiptune is,
| I'm talking about what sits between those. Protracker was how
| you made them. When embedding into apps, you had to play
| them. MOD files had to be converted into something. Lookup
| pocketmod. Some used PCM, some used midi. Windows had a
| wonderful midi api and synth back then. That's what I used.
| vardump wrote:
| No, the MOD file(s) (embedded in the .exe) were just played
| as is. There were a lot of MOD player libraries even back
| then and the CPU load was negligible. The players weighed
| less than 10 kilobytes.
| reactordev wrote:
| >"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.
| vardump wrote:
| 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 generate MIDI data as
| you go, but why bother?
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| Oh, so some people actually used DirectMusic's support for
| DLS? Cool!
| reactordev wrote:
| GS Synth baby!! Back when ActiveX was cool and everything
| was exposed through COM.
| vintagedave wrote:
| 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!
| Keyframe wrote:
| _These days, having the source to these graphic effects would
| be invaluable!_
|
| Nature of _the scene_ was such that one would do an effect and
| then another would wonder how it was done and try to better it,
| all without source. That's kind of why it's rare for you to
| find sources of such things.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| A ton of these things is handwritten assembly. "All" you need
| to do is run it through a disassembler and you got the
| source... the key problem more is that virtually all cracks and
| keygens come heavily packed.
|
| Either to protect the authors of the original software to check
| if the warez group got the full algorithm or if they have
| something mildly different from the original that allows the
| authors to detect a keygen in newer versions, or because the
| warez group wants to make life more difficult for copycats...
| or, and I've seen my fair share of that (and earned good money
| to clean up), a third party wrapped a highly popular keygen
| like for Adobe CS6 in some sort of malware and wanted to avoid
| detection.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Nothing a debugger can't fix. UPX and PKlite packing made
| keygens and cracks look more sus than they were. It source
| had been available, that would make them appear even less
| sus. There were a few drama incidents with Razor where a
| cracker provided source because of accusations.
| bitwize wrote:
| I've built games with raw X draw calls, including sprite-based
| games with XCopyArea and more recently, simulated vector displays
| with XDrawLine. The fact that there were/are kids doing this kind
| of thing with Win32 GDI calls tickles some deep aesthetic sweet
| spot in me.
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