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Comment by comprev | Hacker News Reader

The source code itself appears to come from a cracked version [0]

   supplied by deadbeef\n\n\

   cracked by rOn\n\n\
 
   32kb cool intro by lone";

[0] https://github.com/WinampDesktop/winamp/blob/community/Src/W...

Edit: Apparently it's an Easter Egg! Credit to bri3d for research

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This is a weird Easter Egg that's been compiled into real, genuine, uncracked Winamp release builds for a very long time.

The actual compiled binary ends up with the same text you see linked there scrambled using XOR (you can see that on the other side of the #if 0) to avoid it appearing in the binary's strings verbatim.

It's unfortunately hard to find stuff from the Old Internet anymore (I recall this being discussed at length on the original Winamp forums), but there are some references to it here: https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/366648-winamp-51/page/2/#...

There's a screenshot of the exact text from the source here:

https://eeggs.com/items/45636.html

And someone getting really confused about it on Reddit here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/winamp/comments/caukeo/installed_wi...

Weird, how does that even work? Does cracked mean its' been decompiled? It's strange because it includes other stuff like build scripts, etc that wouldn't be in released binaries..

its probably an easter egg

Yes, by the cracker team not by the Winamp devs.

Those names were some of the original devs & they're the ones who put it in the easter egg on the about dialog that it relates to as a hacker-like joke. The source code is what aol sold on as a stripped down copy of 5.666 & then what radionomy/audiovalley/llama group iterated on afterwards. As much as I dislike what now calls itself "winamp", it's nothing nefarious & you can find old 2.x installs with that about easter egg text.

-dro

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