If you're into this stuff I recommend the artist "Master Boot Record". In particular, they have "Keygen Church" side-project thats epically awesome.
Go open your text editor (vim, right?) to do some coding/etc and listen to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJtVDEx2HSk. No matter what you do, ~20 minutes later it'll have been epic.
I'm not particularly fond of Swedish House Mafia, but given their popularity another fun fact is that Axwell (one third of it) used to go under the name Quazar / Sanxion, and I think most people in the very thin slice of people who have listened to chiptune music have probably heard this gem:
I consider the demoscene style, tracker produced music a distinct genre from "chiptune". To me chiptune is mostly about recreating the sound and feel of vintage console games from the 80's and early 90's. Producers put a lot of work into either emulating the sound chips of those systems or outright using them through various hardware mods. There also seems to be an emphasis on the style of music found in Japanese games of the era.
The keygen/demoscene style songs are produced using MIDI tracker software and leverage the sound capabilities of PC sound cards of the era which have a distinct sound to consoles like the NES. They are tend to have a very different structure, often closer to whatever particular sub genre of electronic dance music happened to be popular that year. Ersatz final fantasy themes played with an emulated SNES sound different than a House track powered by Soundblaster.
The term comes from dedicated synth chips such as the C-64’s SID chip and was used for subsequent music in that style. Generally this was simple waveforms, filters and fast arpeggiation to approximate chords. An example from The Last Ninja on C64: https://youtu.be/1OjPpVrc3gM
Nearly all scene trackers were basically sample sequencers, not MIDI (excluding rare exceptions such as OctaMED which could send midi events as well.)
Chiptune music in the tracker era often meant using a small synth style waveform as the sample so that the music sounded similar to earlier computers. Cracktros with small footprints often did this, example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBv1VHy0Igk
Early demoscene music was often influenced by Italo Disco and it’s offshoots, which were relatively obscure in the states thanks to the homophobic Disco Sucks movement.
‘Chiptune’ in the early console sense gained popularity a bit later, around the time of the VGmix/OCRemix communities. (As well as the LSDJ NullSleep phase where people danced to Gameboy producers.)
I don't think this is true at all. Tracker software in the 90s largely did not have MIDI support, it was an entirely different category of software.
Although it is true that trackers in the PC era grew out of the Amiga (MOD) scene where sample playback was standard, there were also trackers for the 8-bit home computers which were used to create actual chiptunes on SID or the AY-3-8910 and its derivatives.
In the context of demoscene, chiptune-influenced compositions were still extremely popular, because including full-length instrument samples cost far too much space to distribute inside an intro or cracktro. Songs were made up of tiny bursts of white noise and tightly looped single-cycle waveforms, and the bulk of tracker "effects" (pitch bends, arpeggios etc) came directly from the techniques used to coax more tonal variety from sound chips of the 8-bit era.
Tracker music used for intros might not literally be "chiptunes", but they definitely took a lot more influence from chip music than from popular music. For example, this is the track that was bundled with Scream Tracker 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3hpnmANSMw (64-Mania by Edge)
I'm talking explicitly about the PC era. The 8bit machines were far more limited and that music was chiptune in every meaningful way.
But when you get to PC's you didn't have one set in stone hardware FM synth as a standard. Your hardware varied and it was absolutely controlled via MIDI even if you lacked the hardware to interface with external MIDI devices.
Depending on the hardware you had at the time your soundcard gave you either FM Synthesis such as with the classic SoundBlasters, Adlib etc. A fixed sample library in the case of devices like the Sound Canvas. Or with the later more advanced soundcards you had wavetable synthesis starting with the AWE32 which opened you up to soundfonts.
If you had a Sound Canvas or similar "sound module" as they were called, there were many, you absolutely did have external MIDI capabilities because it was a requirement for the device to work. You had to have a MIDI interface card or box. I had a 4 port Roland card in the mid 90's. I don't remember the model but they stopped making drivers after Win98 for it.
I think you are confusing trackers with the more general capabilities that appeared in PC sound cards of the 90s.
Although there were sound cards that supported connecting external MIDI instruments, and there were sound cards that implemented the so-called General MIDI set of instrument sounds on the card itself, tracker software did not use any of this functionality. Trackers loaded samples into memory and mixed the audio in software. This is how Scream Tracker (for example) could output directly to the PC speaker and did not require any particular sound card.
Because everything was mixed in software, the complexity of a composition was limited by the CPU and memory of the computer itself. It didn't matter what sound card you had. On under-powered PCs, loading very large samples or going above 4 or 8 channels of polyphony was not a viable option. This meant that tracker musicians operated under similar restrictions to the chip musicians of the 8-bit era. In fact, quite a few tracker musicians got their start in the 8-bit era, which is why a lot of demoscene music sounds similar to it.
(Edit to add: in case it's not clear, later trackers did use hardware mixing and effects if they were available, but I'm trying to explain more about the culture of the scene and how it influenced the type of music that came out of it.)
I used to make music on modtracker on a celeron, i could load more than 8 tracks but not very long or not playing them simultaneously, so i resourced to downmixing some parts and re-loading them as one single sample, then combining that with hardware synths on a multitrack (portastudio actually).
That's cool! I remember seeing those sorts of tricks in Amiga mods especially.
I jumped from the 8-bit (3 channel) world straight to a 486sx, so getting 16 channels seemed incredible at the time. I soon found out that going above 8 was ill-advised :) The sample size was limited to 64k too, so even if you did bounce tracks together you might only be able to load a few seconds.
File size in general felt like a big deal back then. Going over 100k for the whole mod was considered pretty excessive. I think Fast Tracker 2 ushered in the era of larger samples. I suppose it coincided with modems getting faster too, so people were less reluctant to download songs that got up into the megabyte range.
The demoscene stuff always seemed especially clever to me, because they didn't have the benefit of dedicating the entire computer just to mixing and playback - they needed to display graphics too! I think you can often tell when composers came out of the demoscene by listening for stuff like "J37" arpeggios and the sort of breakdown like in 64-Mania where you play the same sequence in two channels with slightly different settings to create a phasing or chorus effect.
Amiga and Atari ST weren't 8-bit and overlapped the PC era. These were the platforms where the term chiptune emerged and thrived as part of the demo/cracking scene.
The original SoundBlaster, SB Pro & SB 16 could and did output PCM sound, and there were mod players & trackers written for them that enabled the creation of chiptune style music-- generally music with very small PCM samples to sound like the C-64 or Atari ST. These uses on PC had nothing to do with MIDI.
SNES is actually interesting in this context:
The limited sample ram gives it some closeness to chiptunes, but otherwise the Sony chip can actually be considered closer to wavetable synthesizer cards.
This is very different to NES/Gameboy chiptunes that are more synths with maybe one sampled channel.
MBR's website[0], album covers[1] and whole branding are such a throwback and amazing works of art. I personally recommend his retro music covers[2], genially bundled under the name WAREZ.
Yes the art and the keygen music! Thanks for sharing, I was always impressed with the odd set of skills brought together: the technical cracking, art, music, and getting it all in a tiny size that was easy to use. (ahem...you know...for educational reasons)
I remember downloading the full pack for a few mbs since it was all midi.
Now it's 300mb for ~5500 songs, which is still impressive. I actually downloaded out of curiosity and seems like there's now a few mp3s and XMs in there which are bigger than simple midi files.
ReclusiveLemming on Youtube took thousands of chiptunes, formatted them as videos and uploaded them.
Unfortunately he disappeared a couple of years ago leaving no trace, but his channel is still there.
Yes! I included keygen music in our product key generator to great amusement of my colleagues. (No warez - internal tool to generate official license keys for our products)
Occasionally I go on YouTube and look up something like "best keygen music" if I need to study. A lot of keygen music is really good, relaxing-yet-catchy stuff.
This is actually really cool. I've thought about building a BBS like service on the modern web but still having the old feeling. Your design might work for something like this. It has a bit of the feel, at least.
I love the fading as you scroll, it gives that nostalgic feeling of a modem drawing the screen.
Anyway, nice work, I enjoyed scrolling through it.
I actually installed Mystic BBS (http://www.mysticbbs.com/) just this week and had a telnet/ssh board up in minutes. Thought it’d be fun to work on a system like this in a modern language, but figured it’d likely be a colossal waste of time.
TL;DR Position an overlay element (in this case, a <canvas>) at the bottom of the browser viewport and draw some squares in the same color as your site's background color.
Yes, correct. And this method only works because the background is the same color as the overlaid blocks and the font is monospace, so you can precisely position the blocks over the characters.
Not glorifying crime, but one of the best parts of the video game warez scene (for me) was the artwork that accompanied each release.
On later systems like the Nintendo Gamebot Advance you would often find a little demoscene preview before the game booted up. Amazing what you can code in just a few kilobytes of space
I grew up with a Spectrum and later Atari (st 1040, not the 2600), and the accompanying copy parties and sneakernets.
(Hoping the statute of limitations have past.)
It was to the point where I thought that the demo music and loading/menu screens before games were official, and I'm nostalgic for that part of it as much as the games themselves.
The GBA warez intros were the specific inspiration for the "no-intro" rom collection, which originally set out to create a complete collection that had not been modified in any way.
Someone having written a game, spending tons of money over 1 year or more, paying a team, graphic artists, sound guy, etc, hoping to sell it, and then taking that game against their wishes and giving it for free with them not seeing a penny sounds like one.
And the "those downloading the pirate version weren't going to buy anyway"-excuse is bogus. Some weren't, some would - if there wasn't a pirate version.
When you pirate you don't only cater to the poor and the perpetual cheapskates who'd never buy, but also to people who would.
For anyone interested in learning more about the ANSI art scene and BBS history in general, I highly recommend Jason Scott's documentary series "BBS The Documentary"[0]. There is a part specifically dedicated to the art scene [1]. Watching this series in my early teen years really opened my eyes to the fact that the internet subcultures I was then a part of had been around for much longer than I was aware.
It really does go back to the 1960s phone phreak subculture as well as technophile aspects of the hippie subculture. Look for old issues of the Whole Earth Catalog.
A lot of those people from the 1990s grew up and created the tech startup scene, which sometimes reminds me of hacker/warez groups in some ways.
If you're into this sort of thing, you'll like Exploding the Phone[1] which details the history of phone phreaking and Counterculture to Cyberculture [2] which is a critical look at how the Whole Earth Catalog circle interacted with the tech scene.
I'm actively working on a VisiData-based drawing tool that a) uses unicode (including full-width chars), b) supports 256-colors, c) supports animations, and d) works in the terminal. It's called DarkDraw and is already making it easier to create modern terminal art.
Jason has a similar ( maybe the same ? ) Defcon talk, in which the goons apparently mis-schedule something and he starts in, is told someone else is going to present, and just power-speeds through the whole presentation in 3 minutes while the other presenter gets ready. I can't find that video though.
This is one of those fascinating cases where the written word was created before the spoken one, whereas most other human words are the opposite, so it's hard to say which is 'correct' definitively.
holy moly, I think I've said it wrong my whole life now! I always said "war - ez" like "Juarez." "Wares" like "where's" with a Z sound makes a lot of sense. That's funny.
Related, a former colleague was mostly self taught and pronounces "attribute" as "a tribute." The first time I noticed this "mispronouncing in your head" was encountering the name Phobe in a book in high school. I read it as "foh-b" (long oh), not "fee-bee". I had no clue who this "fee-bee" person was that the teacher was talking about! haha
when i was 10 or so, an older friend introduced me to pirated software, and gave me a burned cd-r with some video games and 'warez' written on it in sharpie. i asked my dad what 'wahr-ehz' was, and he told me it was a city in mexico. i was left slightly perplexed but assumed it had something to do with the provenance or distribution. it was at least five years before i figured out what it was supposed to mean.
For anyone thinking they want to start a BBS, or just noodle with some software for nostalgia's sake - this is written in node.js and a lot of fun: https://github.com/NuSkooler/enigma-bbs
I was a teenager in the late 80s and BBSing was a huge part of my life for over a decade. At one point I had met most of my friends through local BBSes.
I have intense nostalgia for those times, running telix[0] (and later qmodem[1]) long into the night searching for warez and filez, emailing and chatting with friends, and of course the glorious ansi art!
I'm not really impressed with the NFOs I see these days. As far as I can tell the "scene" (FXP couriers, tiers of groups, topsites, etc.) is pretty dried up and there are just a few "groups" releasing torrents these days, so the diversity of NFO art as well as the competitive aspect seems significantly less fun than it used to.
Or I've gotten older and more out of touch. Hard to tell which sometimes :)
Renegade BBS always did a great job of incorporating ascii art into the UX. Signing on to a Renegade BBS always had this great feeling as the art scrolled.
I was way into the BBS scene in Portland, Oregon in the early 90s.
Played LORD, the risk game, a little Trade Wars etc.
But also uses the messaging services and met my first person from “online” in real life.
My mom drove me to an outlet mall in Troutdale to meet him.
I also did some ASCII art for smaller boards. I haven’t finished this documentary, but for every one of these nicely finished art pieces there were many, many jenky simple intros.
My stuff was small animations, moving stick people around big simpler logos that kind of thing. I remember spending days animating a small Spider Man character.
It was also where I spent my first money online, where I sent cash in the mail to a BBS based out of Lake Oswego. I think to get more time with them.
They were one of the fewer with a trunk, so there were multiple users online at once, and less chance of a busy signal.
It was really cool back then, there was a small weekly paper publication with a page in the classifieds dedicated to BBSs. That was how I found out about new ones.
It's kind of funny that this popped up because I just finished watching BBS: The Documentary and there is a whole segment about ANSI art. If you want to see it its on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQrBbm5ZMlo
There is an old piece of animated ansi art I'd like to see again, it was a file on DECUS tapes containing a long ANSI escape sequence. The file was JACK.OFF and yes, that's pretty self explanatory. it's more "stick figure" quality than anything elaborate, but it was funny.
Why the focus on warez? There was a lot of ASCII/ANSI art making that had nothing to do with illegally ripping off copywritten software. For example, any BBS sysop would've had an opportunity to show off their custom ANSI art as part of the BBS itself.
There was a brief period after the precipitous crash of BBS popularity where exposure to ANSI art was mostly through warez intros and crackscene tools.
Anyone who was a teen in the 90s is more likely to reminisce about the warez scene than the BBS scene, which was popular when they were rather young kids.
I think it has more to do with the type of audiences. I was lucky enough to have access to my dad's Atari 8-bit computer, as well as a 286, both that allowed me to connect to BBS systems. I was exposed to the ASCII/ANSI art early on. Most of my friends did not have PCs until the late 90's or early 2000's. Their experience with the art was through .NFO files in warez. I imagine how old you are, and when your first experience with computing, dictates your connection to the art scene.
That's hilarious. I had a customer in a computer store (decades ago) ask if I knew where to find Juarez. Given we were in Houston, it wasn't an unreasonable question so I asked, "Juarez...Mexico?"
"No, like wah-rez...the illegal software downloads."
"Oh...right. N-no." Setting aside that I'm not into giving out professional "how to break the law" advice, I was just completely baffled. I figured "warez" came from "softwares" that were being distributed. Never crossed my mind to pronounce it phonetically.
I have met folks who pronounce it like "Juarez" but where I grew up it was "wares." IMO the latter makes much more sense because it's likely derived from "software(s)". But so much discussion about warez was nonverbal, it doesn't surprise me that the word took on different pronunciations.
I had never considered software(s) as a potential root, and had always assumed it was related to the idiom or a vendor selling their wares, just goes to show how tricky English can be:
"software", "cookware", "earthenware", "hardware", "tinware", "glassware", et al. are all various kinds of ware, notice. Tangible ones can often be found housed in warehouses.
In Estonian, "vares" [v-uh-res] stands for crow (corvus). I first met the w-word as a kid of the early 1990s; however, to this day, that analogy is still the first that pops up to me. A warez is a vares is a vares.
You're the second person to ask that. Can I ask why you think Juarez would work? Not trying to be mocking, just curious if its a regional thing that explains it or something else. That Warez = wares with a Z for cool factor was self evident to me growing up on the east coast of the US at the time.
and the other way is a bit risky but look at bittorrent listings and DL ascii art there, [its in the .NFOs of course] it still exists, just be wary when using such sources on a system that will execute .txt as if its .exe as there are sometimes code embedded in the ASCII.
I wasted so much time trying to make non-terrible animated ANSI art with TheDraw. I remember the first time I realized I could run it in 80x43 mode instead of 80x25 mode and my mind was completely blown.
I also remember what a pain it was if you wanted to change color schemes. Especially on an animated piece. I had a BBS animated main screen that originally was red and yellow and at some point I decided bright blue and green would be more “3733+” and I needed to step through it character by character.
