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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.
       
       
 (HTM) [0] S3M format
 (HTM) [1] Keygen Music
 (HTM) [2] Tomasino's Keygen Mix