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self_awareness
A lot of those were written in assembly by teenagers, using WinAPI directly. Yet they still run on Win10/Win11. A lost art.
m00dy
If you’re familiar with these concepts, Deepwalker’s intro [0] is heavily inspired by the HOODLUM GTA5 demoscene :)

[0]: https://deepwalker.xyz

mavamaarten
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!

ValdikSS
Funny enough, that Digital Insanity tune was just an embedded .mp3, which was considered very low-key for the time—it greatly enlarged the .exe size compared to the chiptunes.
ryandrake
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.
stavros
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.

overgard
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.
reactordev
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.

vintagedave
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!

effekt
As for cracktros, probably not. I should spelunk through backups. However, the most technical and competitive people generally transitioned to the demoscene in the early 2000s and that scene is far more open.

You can find a lot of groups/individuals publish a lot of esp. their older stuff now.

Two off the top of my head:

- https://github.com/ConspiracyHu (and they made a W32 port of Future Crew's Second Reality, which is public domain: https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality)

- Farbrausch published their original demo tool source ages ago: https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public

bitwize
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.