Comment by milchek
1 day ago
This is dense. I skimmed through hoping to see examples of the “aesthetics” with screenshots of old school installers (like the ones from Razor 1911, Class, Deviance etc) - it looks like these are scattered around the web, though. If anyone wants to relive some of the old chiptunes from these installers there’s https://archive.org/details/codex-installer-music-5-2018-03-...
Razor 1911! Now here’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time, but teenage me was very grateful to.
The .nfo files alone, distributed with most releases, carrying the most elaborate of ASCII art. I distinctly remember the aesthetics you mention.
If you ever need to scratch that ASCII art itch: https://asciiarena.se/
> The .nfo files alone, distributed with most releases, carrying the most elaborate of ASCII art. I distinctly remember the aesthetics you mention.
See their 40 year retrospective demo for a lot more of that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dybkLM-1eQo :)
I still refer to 1:37 pm (13:37) as "l33t o'clock" and 7:11 pm (19:11) as "Razor o'clock". They seem to come up remarkably often when I glance at the time, like 11:11 for normies, but I think all of these are some sort of pareidolic/selection-bias effect wherein your brain is just more likely to remember/notice times that it considers significant.
Remember realizing it’s 0x777, one better than 666?
Probably more a reference to total file permissions.
1 reply →
I believe this was the case, as there was a lot of 666 going around at the time.
> I skimmed through hoping to see examples of the “aesthetics” […]
aesthetics is an umbrella term for the "[…] norms and rules of participation, […] forms of sociality, and […] artistic outputs." — think: sociology, culture, customs, and less visuals. reading chapter five (aesthetics), perhaps unsurprisingly the chapter where the author dives deeper into the topic, is certainly advised.
Be sure to check out keygen music, still updated
https://keygenmusic.tk/
There used to be a large site called keygenmusic.org, but it's closed now. There's a dump of all of its tracks on web archive: https://archive.org/details/key-gen-music-music-pack-2020-03...
Some of the chiptune musicians are still active. Dubmood made it onto the Hotline Miami (2012) soundtrack.