Nearly two decades ago on the usenet newsgroups comp.sys.ibm.pc.demos and comp.sys.ibm.pc.soundcard, there were some accusations flung around that Josh Jensen (Cyberstrike of Renaissance, for those who still remember the PC demoscene) had copied entire chunks of Mark J. Cox‘s MODPLAY to use in his own modplayer SuperProPlay (and later MASI sound system). Just as time has a way of healing old wounds, advances in technology has a way of ripping them open again, and a chance encounter with some familiar assembly code in October got me thinking about the accusations against Jensen all those years ago. I didn’t give it much attention back then, but I’m a different person now, with much more skill than I had 20 years ago. With decades of x86 assembler, reverse-engineering, and programming skills under my belt, I decided to take another look at this issue to see if it could be answered definitively. I armed myself with much better RE tools (IDA) as well as Josh’s released Protracker Playing Source (PPS) v1.10 source code (PPS110.ZIP) and spent about an hour looking at them both.

My verdict: Josh quite absolutely copied entire chunks of MODPLAY for use in his own code.

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