Down the rabbit gap: Whereas gathering Winamp skins for an archival venture a number of years again, programmer Jordan Eldredge couldn’t assist however discover that a few of them had been corrupt. Relatively than discard the damaged skins, he took a better look and ended up traversing a collection of rabbit holes that led to all types of enjoyable discoveries.
Buried inside the corrupted Winamp skins was a slew of hidden content material which may have in any other case gone undiscovered had it not been for Eldredge’s curiosity.
The primary file he checked out contained a PDF for an inflatable balloon costume rental. One other, labeled bobs_car, contained a photograph of a automobile – presumably, Bob’s. One encrypted file was hiding an e mail handle and password, whereas a separate password-protected file contained a number of .avs information.
Elsewhere, Eldredge stumbled upon a biography of musician Chet Baker, an assortment of bizarre MP3s, pictures of individuals, and extra. One pores and skin contained a file named Worm.exe that sounded extremely sketchy. A virus scan didn’t detect something out of the atypical so somebody on Discord volunteered to run it on a VM. It ended up being a Snake-like recreation – neat.
Eldredge then acquired the concept to attempt to seek for skins hidden inside the corrupted skins. Jackpot! A complete of 127 skins had been found – 54 of which weren’t already within the Winamp Pores and skin Museum (they’ve since been added).
Whereas there’s nothing groundbreaking right here, it’s a enjoyable reminder of how playful the Web and its individuals had been in its earlier days. And who is aware of what different form of buried treasures is likely to be lurking in different, non-corrupted Winamp skins. There’s additionally seemingly a ton of undiscovered Easter eggs in different classic software program that’ll by no means get uncovered.
If you’re in any respect into Winamp, I might extremely advocate testing the Winamp Pores and skin Museum. The venture options roughly 80,000 skins, every with interactive previews. If there’s a specific pores and skin you might be trying to find, odds are you can see it right here.
