Corrupt Winamp skin investigation leads to treasure trove of hidden content

[Shawn Knight]

Down the rabbit hole: While collecting Winamp skins for an archival project a few years back, programmer Jordan Eldredge could not help but notice that some of them were corrupt. Rather than discard the broken skins, he took a closer look and ended up traversing a series of rabbit holes that led to all sorts of fun discoveries.

Buried within the corrupted Winamp skins was a slew of hidden content that might have otherwise gone undiscovered had it not been for Eldredge's curiosity.

The first file he looked at contained a PDF for an inflatable balloon costume rental. Another, labeled bobs_car, contained a photo of a vehicle – presumably, Bob's. One encrypted file was hiding an email address and password, while a separate password-protected file contained several .avs files.

Elsewhere, Eldredge stumbled upon a biography of musician Chet Baker, an assortment of weird MP3s, photos of people, and more. One skin contained a file named Worm.exe that sounded incredibly sketchy. A virus scan did not detect anything out of the ordinary so someone on Discord volunteered to run it on a VM. It ended up being a Snake-like game – neat.

Also read: What Ever Happened to Winamp?

Eldredge then got the idea to try and search for skins hidden within the corrupted skins. Jackpot! A total of 127 skins were discovered – 54 of which were not already in the Winamp Skin Museum (they have since been added).

While there is nothing groundbreaking here, it is a fun reminder of how playful the Internet and its participants were in its earlier days. And who knows what other sort of buried treasures might be lurking in other, non-corrupted Winamp skins. There's also likely a ton of undiscovered Easter eggs in other vintage software that'll never get uncovered.

If you are at all into Winamp, I would highly recommend checking out the Winamp Skin Museum. The project features roughly 80,000 skins, each with interactive previews. If there is a particular skin you are searching for, odds are you will find it here.

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Corrupt Winamp skin investigation leads to treasure trove of hidden content

 

[bviktor]

It really whips the llamas' @ss!

 

[amghwk]

Winamp skins can be called as the first ever "modding scene".

Personally, I never liked pictures in the background. For me, these distract and obscure the main controls and clean views.

Other than that, there are very nicely done skins. Like that Gameboy inspired skin.

 

[nintendo1889]

Winamp skins can be called as the first ever "modding scene".

I believe that the Doom level hacking scene was the first notable one; it led to changes in Doom 2 where the game could be hacked without needing binary edits of executables.

There was probably mods, hacks and trainers before Doom, especially on the Amiga.

Jason from textfiles dot com might have more info on what was the first modding scene.

 

[Zcolor]

Download Zoom Player. It's hands down the best music software out there. I know, I've tried them all in the past twenty-five years...

 

[amghwk]

I believe that the Doom level hacking scene was the first notable one; it led to changes in Doom 2 where the game could be hacked without needing binary edits of executables.

There was probably mods, hacks and trainers before Doom, especially on the Amiga.

Jason from textfiles dot com might have more info on what was the first modding scene.

True.

I forgot to mention that this modding scene in a music player. Other than Windows Media Player skins, I cannot think of another player that had so many people providing skins for a player.

 

[omgfoz]

I believe that the Doom level hacking scene was the first notable one; it led to changes in Doom 2 where the game could be hacked without needing binary edits of executables.

There was probably mods, hacks and trainers before Doom, especially on the Amiga.

Jason from textfiles dot com might have more info on what was the first modding scene.

Remember Scorched Earth for Dos? I used to edit the .txt files it used to make the tanks say even sillier things. How I figured this out when I was probably 7 or 8 years old? No clue.

 

[nintendo1889]

Remember Scorched Earth for Dos? I used to edit the .txt files it used to make the tanks say even sillier things. How I figured this out when I was probably 7 or 8 years old? No clue.

I would do similar things. For example I would edit game loading images because they were sitting there as .pcx files