[userbinator]

The complete disregard for any legalities has certainly resulted in some very interesting and even useful software. It reminds me of the (largely Asian) community that formed around modding/hacking/cracking Windows in various ways, and the products that resulted: CDs and DVDs with a dozen different versions of Windows on them, liveCD/USB/DVDs, and chimeric combinations of OSes. If I remember correctly, Vista and later had significantly increased the number of integrity checks in the OS, arguably for security reasons, which made this sort of experimentation more difficult; but in the 2K/XP/2K3 days, it was pretty open.

Those in the scene may recognise the names Roy and Wengier, 911cd, and the China DOS Union.

Here is an interesting article from those days: http://pasotech.altervista.org/mirrors/michael_kh_au-yeung/n... (file links are mostly dead though)