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The warez scene is so fascinating

Fularu

Banned
People saying "What year is this? 1999?" are amusing. As if piracy and warez groups/codes/rules were that recent.

Here's a funfact, to help speed up the adoption rate of the Apple ][, Apple itself (not openly, of course) helped propagate piracy across Europe. It was used as a tool to get computers into people's homes and hook them up.

Some pirate groups have been around for over 3 decades (looking at your RZR1911, FLT or SkidRow), doing releases over several different generations of computers (SkidRow was an Atari ST group originally with a few releases for Amiga here and there, FLT/Razor were Amiga groups, Paradox was a NES/SNES group and so on). That world was beyond fascinating and getting in touch with your local spreader who got you games sometimes months before release (I remember grabbing Risky Woods a good 6 months before magazines even had previews) was surreal.

Also it helped preserve the Amiga and Atari ST libraries. A lot of current Amiga and ST dumps are only cracked versions because the original ones have either been lost, damaged or never released officially. It may have been for fun way back then, but nowadays the work they did is invaluable.
 

nasax

Member
That music they used in their keygens and whatnot was great . I would totally listen to a compilation of that.

*edit*
Beaten so many times by other posters in this thread.
 

Ogodei

Member
I honestly have no clue, I just know people were copying things onto CDs and the Dreamcasts were reading those CDs without any pesky soldered modchips.



Ahhh okay, cool. So people were essentially overburning or ripping games and resampling video/audio. Fascinating indeed! The dumping tricks too xD

It was easy to redirect Phantasy Star Online through the DNS options. Also opened a backdoor to the GameCube through the GC version of PSO.
 

nded

Member
I imagine most people in this particular scene hold no delusions of doing what they do for some greater purpose other than showing off and not paying for stuff.

Still, until the preservation and dissemination of old games is taken more seriously by legitimate channels, these thieves and pirates are the best archivists we have.
 

fushi

Member
I hope some of you "b-b-but they are thieves!" people realize that their work indirectly lead to services like Spotify, Netflix and Steam being born.

That, and archival, but that is mostly done by a different set of hobbyists.
 

opoth

Banned
It was fun to dabble with in my teens and early 20s, setting the moral issues aside, the console scene had some cool esoteric hardware, still have my Double Pro Fighter, MGD2 with most of the attachments and a Super Wildcard 2dx packed away on a closet.

To be clear, I always bought the games that I enjoyed, I probably owned 40 legitimate NES cartridges, 30 or so for SNES and probably 25 for Genesis. It was a fun hobby to be part of, but even at a young age I understood the impact of piracy.
 
Folks are being too hard on the OP. Coincidentally, just the other day I was wondering to myself why Ken Burns still hasn't made a 20 part PBS documentary entitled "Kazaa, America's Secret Yet Somehow Noble Pastime of Yesteryear" thoughtfully narrated by Sam Waterston, Morgan Freeman and George Plimpton.
 

Apt101

Member
When I was first studying computer science I got into it a little. I was fascinated with manipulating software, and it kind of served as educational activities to go along with my schooling.

Back when computer shows were a thing, there would be a thriving warez scene there. Selling CD's with different examples of hacks and cracks, people sharing virus and exploit code, etc.

I bought any software I wrote cracks for, and I never pirated. I never condoned the other side of the scene, which was basically just enthusiasm for what was then a new form of theft. I stopped supporting it entirely long before college was over.
 
What year is it
I don't think I've heard that word since 2005 or 2006.

Napster was first for me. I was around 14. Then Kazaa when Napster went legit. It didn't take long for Kazaa to turn to shit; every other file would contain a virus. So Limewire replaced it. Limewire never was quite as good as Kazaa. After that came torrents.

Still torrents today. I don't see anything replacing it, really. It feels like the final form of file sharing.

That was my trajectory as well, except I was about 7 years younger. There was a phase of Rapidshare/4Shared/MegaUpload/MegaVideo in the middle, if that counts.
 

Lijik

Member
i wish something would play around with the unique aesthetic of installers, intros and keygens. There was a flair to it all that i find easy to romanticize
 

CloudWolf

Member
These hidden internet groups are fascinating. I wouldn't say I respect them, but it is interesting how many of these big things that happen on the internet are completely hidden from most. For instance, since the notorious 'Fappening' event, we also know there are entire groups out there who share and collect stolen nude pictures. You never hear about these guys unless these big leaks happen like in 2014, but I can imagine they have been around for a looooong time and that they have access to a lot more stuff than what was leaked.

Are there any documentaries, stories, books, etc on this kind of stuff?

I don't remember what it's called, but I once read a pretty lengthy article about the big players in early music piracy. It was fascinating. One of the guys had an insider man at the cd pressing factory who smuggled out the newest albums and there was this entire distribution ring set up over IRC. Very interesting stuff.
 
I find the whole scene a bit pathetic really. The race to be first is fine, but how seriously they take it all is just embarrassing, calling each other out and that.

I remember when one scene group complained about another using their line audio without permission. We're talking about a stolen movie here...

Also those fucking awful midi themes they'll attach to video game installs. Oh god.

I'm sorry... Did you just call chiptune "fucking awful midi themes"?

https://youtu.be/_suw_zyAX30

How long have you been playing videogame by the way? Guess you started after the 16bit era...

did I just get baited?
 
Game rips were fun - they squeezed gigabytes of game into a few hundred megabytes and then it took like an hour to install/decompress.
 
I remember it being really interesting way back when (mid/late 90's for me).

I always hung out in the #WinBeta (or maybe it was just #WinMemphis back then) IRC channel (Undernet FTW) for the Windows 98 beta leaks. Downloading like 32 disks each time a new build was secreted out. It was fantastic.

I never really had a fast enough internet connection to download much, but browsing some of the FTP sites was like being in your own personal Babbages (that's like a Gamestop to you younger folks). I can totally see how we went from that back then to digital distribution today.
 

Chittagong

Gold Member
Has anyone ever been involved with the shoplifting scene?

It always seemed like such a cool underground thing. All those groups competing to walk out of shops unnoticed with fashion brand clothes, cosmetics, jewellery, etc. all while avoiding attention from the mainstream & legal venues. There's probably a shit ton of drama and politics involved too

Major respect for these guys and gals. The shoplifting scene appears to be one of the very few subcultures that has been kept hidden underground for the most past, especially in this day and age.

Are there any documentaries, stories, books, etc on this kind of stuff?
 
Ah, it's always great to see people putting software pirates in the same camp as shoplifters, thieves, the KKK and pedophiles. A great display of the sense of moral perspective some have.
 

Vice

Member
These hidden internet groups are fascinating. I wouldn't say I respect them, but it is interesting how many of these big things that happen on the internet are completely hidden from most. For instance, since the notorious 'Fappening' event, we also know there are entire groups out there who share and collect stolen nude pictures. You never hear about these guys unless these big leaks happen like in 2014, but I can imagine they have been around for a looooong time and that they have access to a lot more stuff than what was leaked.



I don't remember what it's called, but I once read a pretty lengthy article about the big players in early music piracy. It was fascinating. One of the guys had an insider man at the cd pressing factory who smuggled out the newest albums and there was this entire distribution ring set up over IRC. Very interesting stuff.
This book
goes very indepth into that story, if it's about the same factory working who was putting the discs behind belt buckles.
 
Has anyone ever been involved with the shoplifting scene?

It always seemed like such a cool underground thing. All those groups competing to walk out of shops unnoticed with fashion brand clothes, cosmetics, jewellery, etc. all while avoiding attention from the mainstream & legal venues. There's probably a shit ton of drama and politics involved too

Major respect for these guys and gals. The shoplifting scene appears to be one of the very few subcultures that has been kept hidden underground for the most past, especially in this day and age.

Are there any documentaries, stories, books, etc on this kind of stuff?

I don't like reminding people of their old thread, but I don't think you're the right person to take the moral high ground here.... i mean giving your money to the north korean regime is way worse than pirating IMO...

I didn't judge you for it at the time, but then you post this here, way to go! What a shitty comparison
 
The amount of scene rules for basically everything (audio, video, games, books, etc.) is amusing...

https://scenerules.org
Is it though? Scene standards are actually pretty awesome. It's like the Nintendo Seal of Quality if Nintendo also didn't let some complete trash slide by.

To this day I'd say a scene release is better than the actual retail release, or a source stream. Hmm, should I log into HBO Go in my web browser to watch Game of Thrones in a ridiculously feature poor web browser video player with garbage frame pacing or should I load up the WEB-DL of the same thing with perfect frame pacing in PotPlayer along with a myriad of post-processing video options and audio normalization, with seek, pause, and play options that act instantly. Gee, I wonder.
 

Herne

Member
The warez scene on the C64 started early. Crackers and cracking groups would code intro screens that included greetz and call-outs, much like in the pc scene today. It became a competition to crack and distribute your warez before other groups did. As time went by these intro screens became more elaborate and it became a challenge to code the best looking and sounding screens, with the best coders figuring out cool tricks like removing the borders and putting sprites up there, exploiting bugs in the chips themselves, etc.

This resulted in the demo scene, where groups exist only to produce great compilations of audio and visual treats, to push the machine to it's absolute limit. This went onto other machines as well, like the Spectrum, Amiga, Atari ST and many more. These demo scenes are still active to this day.

A book I can highly recommend is Commodork - Tales From A Sordid BBS Junkie by Rob O'Hara, which tells of his experiences cracking and distributing warez across bulletin boards in America, long before the Internet arrived. Obviously he's talking about things from an American viewpoint - people stopped using the C64 over there much earlier than in Europe, and I'm not sure if there's any demo group over there left. But he talks about the old days and it's an absolutely fascinating read.
 
Shame the biggest music torrent website went down a while back. Now there's countless albums wiped from existence and may only have one or two extant copies on someone's hard-drive in their attic.

Shout out to piracy giving us all the great services like Spotify and Netflix today, in addition to preservation of an unimaginable amount of media that would've been lost otherwise.
 

MUnited83

For you.
The amount of scene rules for basically everything (audio, video, games, books, etc.) is amusing...

https://scenerules.org

One of the greatest things about them. I really wish official companies bothered to follow half of those rules when selling content. Those standards are really nice to have and are what make the pirated content better than the original in many cases.
 

N7.Angel

Member
Hypocrisy the thread...

Anyway, some people need to realize that piracy is the only way for some people to have access to content because it's sometimes not available in your country for stupid reason or too expensive, my gaming/manga/movie culture come from piracy, I'm not doing it anymore because I have a well paid job and the money to fulfill my desire to support them but when I was a teenager or a young adult, I used piracy as my principal source of entertainment and you know what ? those compagnies are still making bilions, new service came to life with a better deal for consumers like Netflix, Spotify etc...and movies released in bluray/digital in 3 monts now, it's a win win situation.
 
D

Deleted member 1235

Unconfirmed Member
Shame the biggest music torrent website went down a while back. Now there's countless albums wiped from existence and may only have one or two extant copies on someone's hard-drive in their attic.

Shout out to piracy giving us all the great services like Spotify and Netflix today, in addition to preservation of an unimaginable amount of media that would've been lost otherwise.

Yeah I like it cause it forces legitimate companies to innovate like netflix.

Shame HBO can't figure it out in order to cut back on the legendary levels of piracy haha.
 

Nikodemos

Member
The scene moved to big name shows and, to a lesser extent, anime fansubs.

And it's big in shows. We're talking hundreds of millions of people downloading. Same beef, same drama when a group fucks up and desyncs several seconds of audio from the clip or messes up encoding in a portion, and the rest roast them publicly.

Anime fansubs OTOH are a bloodbath. Woolsey versus verbatim, -san versus casual, and even Japanese terms versus full-English.
 

D4Danger

Unconfirmed Member
I always thought it was interesting that even these groups had standards. You can find actual agreed upon standards for things like video encoding guides. They are actually pretty useful.
 
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