alt Hacker NewsFor 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!
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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.
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
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.