> I am in no way encouraging or advocating for software piracy.

I am.

I do advocate for the importance of backward engineering - with its companion, competence and awareness over the lower-level.

First piece of dance music i ever heard was the Razor1911 Terminator demo

>I consider the NFO files a legitimate form of art

As a teenage boy, I had them printed with my father's dot matrix printer, and put them on my wall as decoration. Fascinating stuff.

and keygen music

The channel Ahoy on YouTube dove into Tracker music, and has a few callouts on how this materialized in the Warez scene. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw

I listened to keygen music a great deal at one point. I'd run them through Winamp to produce something I could burn to a CD and listen to in the car. Pretty funny seeing Photoshop, Easy DVD Creator, Power ISO, and whatever else streaming across my car's track display.

...and Drive Music is a form of art (even if it makes your local data safety person cringe):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR454sxi27o

So much fun. Hanging out on Undernet in channels like #zeraw, exchanging hacked corporate FTP servers where people had uploaded disk images.

My friend was way further (better?) at the scene then I ever was but we'd pool our resources. I.e. he'd get access to an FTP and share it with me. I'd download disks 1 - 10 and he'd grab 11 - 20. We'd then use a direct dial program with our modems to share the remaining disks with each other (using ZModem!) overnight. Double our bandwidth!

#cracking4newbies on efnet

> I consider the NFO files a legitimate form of art

I still install DAMN NFO Viewer on my main PC just so I can appreciate some of the .nfo files I still have.

I have VSCode set to use CP437 as my codepage and show control characters for "plain text" files, which works surprisingly well as it's only older art/projects/bbs stuff, generally anything else is a specific file type that will use utf8 by default.

    "files.associations": {
      "*.msg": "plaintext",
      "*.ans": "plaintext",
      "*.asc": "plaintext",
      "*.rip": "plaintext",
      "*.nfo": "plaintext",
      ...
    },
    ...
    "[plaintext]": {
      "files.encoding": "cp437",
      "files.eol": "\r\n",
      "editor.renderControlCharacters": true
    },

I wasn't aware of this at the time, but apparently INC "leaked" a game to The Humble Guys which was modified to search for a modem and dial 911, supposedly leading to some police visits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Network_of_Crack...

If you want to watch a cool talk about the evolution of NFO and ascii (color) art scene and processes, I recommend watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILNs1GChGDk

Nfos, great Culture.

growing up in the 80s with a Commodore 64, my friends and I never bought any games. They were all "cracked by $some_cracker"

Yeah we literally had a club we’d go to and just copy each others floppies!

As a poor 12 year old they weren’t losing money. I had none!

Grew up around the same time, we would typically change $some_cracker to our nicknames before trading them to the next person.

Me neither, whatever little money we had, it went towards hardware.

Yessss, this was so fun. I still have backups of all my own nfo files that I was credited for cracks in ;) razor, pdm, myth.