Cracktros
 

Do groups still distribute cracktros anymore? It seems like people are reluctant to run additional binaries these days for fear of malware, and also that these extra programs are stripped from the releases when they inevitably make it to torrent sites and such.

From what I understand, the demoscene was actually born out of the 0day scene, so it makes sense that this tradition should stay alive. I've seen some releases have been distributed with video intros (I mean an actual MP4 video of some special effect - I've no idea how these are made), but I guess this isn't as neat as having the effects produced programatically.

I know it's possible to do demo effects in JavaScript, so perhaps distributing a intro.hml that runs and renders locally would be an interesting and safe way to keep writing cracktros, or are the days of cracktros over?

For reference, here's a CORE cracktro from 2001 (youtube) with code by neoman.

I've been doing some demo programming over the last few days and thought I'd share the results with you here.

You'll need Windows XP to run them, otherwise you'll need an emulator such as DOSBox.

This is an example of "size coding", where there is a limit on the executable size, which in this case was 256 bytes.

• Watch it on YouTube
• Download from Pouet

• Watch it on YouTube
• Download from Pouet