I can recommend Blackplayer to fill that niche in a more modern (yet still simplistic) way. I don't see it mentioned much but it is regularly updated and extremely feature-dense.
Disclaimer: I am in no way encouraging or advocating for software piracy.
The warez scene in 90s and early 00s was fun to follow. I consider the NFO files a legitimate form of art, not to mention the skills for unpacking and keygen-ing or cracking of the protected software.
I listened to keygen music a great deal at one point. I'd run them through Winamp to produce something I could burn to a CD and listen to in the car. Pretty funny seeing Photoshop, Easy DVD Creator, Power ISO, and whatever else streaming across my car's track display.
So much fun. Hanging out on Undernet in channels like #zeraw, exchanging hacked corporate FTP servers where people had uploaded disk images.
My friend was way further (better?) at the scene then I ever was but we'd pool our resources. I.e. he'd get access to an FTP and share it with me. I'd download disks 1 - 10 and he'd grab 11 - 20. We'd then use a direct dial program with our modems to share the remaining disks with each other (using ZModem!) overnight. Double our bandwidth!
I have VSCode set to use CP437 as my codepage and show control characters for "plain text" files, which works surprisingly well as it's only older art/projects/bbs stuff, generally anything else is a specific file type that will use utf8 by default.
I wasn't aware of this at the time, but apparently INC "leaked" a game to The Humble Guys which was modified to search for a modem and dial 911, supposedly leading to some police visits.
I think it's at least a decade since Texas Instruments introduced the FRAM series of their MSP430 microcontrollers [0]. Good to know there are efforts to bring such technologies to "bigger" computers - having TBs of RAM in your laptop must be fun.