games

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene

Skidrow is a scene group. There's this thing called "The Scene". It's been around since the 1970s. It's not a website or centralized at any place. The Scene is made up of decentralized groups and they talk over IRC and agree upon release rules and release their files on ftp servers called "Topsites". Topsites are only accessible by scene members but the releases get leaked to torrent sites. The structure is sort of anarchistic, but which I mean nonhierarchical and consensus-based decision making. It's kind of fascinating.

To determine whether a scene release is trustworthy, it would depend where you downloaded it from and whether the release is still in the original rar files. Scene releases are uploaded to Topsites, but they are also announced in what is called a "pre", the pre is the announcement message on the IRC server. There is a thing called "predb", which records all of the release messages and makes them publicly searchable. The scene rules say that a game release has to be published in a multipart RAR archive, which also includes an .nfo file and a .sfv file. The reason for this is that Scene is very old and file transfers used to be slow so they broke up big releases into small even-sized files to easily replace corrupted files. The NFO file includes ascii art and information about the release. The SFV file contains CRC32 checksums for each RAR file. The SFV file is used to determine whether the RAR files were modified or corrupted.

I will say disclaimer. It is possible to fake CRC32 checksums. Matching CRC32 will not guarantee that files have not been tampered, but if the CRC32 doesn't match then the files have been tampered or corrupted.

1. Make sure that you are getting the files from a website that you trust.
2. Make sure that the release is still in the original scene multipart rar files.
3. Search a predb website for the release name which matches the files that you downloaded.
4. Look at the CRC32 checksums on the website and check that it matches the file you downloaded.

I not sure the best way to do CRC32 checksums on windows. I usually do checksums on windows using 7zip software. With 7zip software, you can right click on a file in windows file explorer > 7-Zip > CRC SHA > CRC 32.

https://predb.org/ (I think this site is correct, there are other predb sites as well)