Cracktro for the cracking group Quartex onAmiga. A typical crack intro has a scrolling text marquee at the bottom of the screen.
Acrack intro, also known as acracktro,loader, or justintro, is a small introduction sequence added tocracked software. It aims to inform the user which cracking crew or individual cracker removed the software'scopy protection and distributed the crack.[1][2][3]
Crack intros first appeared onApple II computers in the late 1970s or early 1980s,[2][4][5] and then onZX Spectrum,Commodore 64 andAmstrad CPC games that were distributed around the world viaBulletin Board Systems (BBSes) andfloppy disk copying.[5] By 1985, when reviewing the commercially availableISEPIC cartridge which adds a custom crack intro tomemory dumps of Commodore 64 software,Ahoy! wrote that such intros were "in the tradition of the true hacker".[6] Early crack intros resemblegraffiti in many ways, although they invaded theprivate sphere and not the public space.[7][8]
As time went on, crack intros became a medium to demonstrate the purported superiority of a cracking group.[4] Such intros grew very complex, sometimes exceeding the size[9] and complexity[10] of the software itself. Crack intros only became more sophisticated on more advanced systems such as theAmiga,Atari ST, and someIBM PC compatibles with sound cards.[5] These intros feature big, colourfuleffects,music, andscrollers.[11]
Cracking groups would use the intros not just to gain credit for cracking, but to advertise theirBBSes, greet friends, and gain themselves recognition.[4] Messages were frequently of a vulgar nature, and on some occasions made threats of violence against software companies or the members of some rival crack-group.[4]
Crack-intro programming eventually became an art form in its own right, and people started coding intros without attaching them to a crack just to show off how well they could program. This practice evolved into thedemoscene.[1]
Crack intros and other small software created bysoftware crackers such askeygens andpatches that remove protection from commercial applications often usechiptunes in the form of background music. These chiptunes are now still accessible as downloadablemusicdisks ormusicpacks.[12]
^abWhitehead, Dan (12 November 2008)."Linger in Shadows".Eurogamer. Archived fromthe original on 24 September 2019. Retrieved23 October 2010.Amateur coders busy cracking the copy-protection on the latest Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum games got into the habit of marking their work with an animated intro - or "cracktro" - inserted before the game began.
^abGreen, Dave (July 1995)."Demo or Die!".Wired. Retrieved23 October 2010.
Patryk Wasiak,‘Illegal Guys’. A History of Digital Subcultures in Europe during the 1980s, in: Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History, Online-Ausgabe, 9 (2012), H. 2
Hastik, Canan; Steinmetz, Arnd (2012a):Demoscene Artists and CommunityArchived 2013-12-12 at theWayback Machine. In Bours, Patrick; Humm, Bernhard; Loew, Robert; Stengel, Ingo; Walsh, Paul (eds.): Proceedings of CERC 2012, pp. 43–48.
Chiptune.com – A chiptune dedicated website containing thousands of chiptunes from Amiga and other formats. The website itself emulates theAmiga Workbench 1.3.
