The secret image of the team that worked on the Power Macintosh G3. Image Credit: Brown arc
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Dag Brown, which conducts a blog that documents his experiments and research on old computers, said that he accidentally discovered an Easter egg, looking at the resources in the Power Mac G3 ROM. This model was made by Apple from November 1997 to August 1999.
The same ROM was used for the Minitower, All-Ino and Beige Desktop models. Brown said that he spent “lazy Sunday” using a couple of tools called Rom Fiend and Hex Feed to view the G3 ROM resources.
He soon noticed two unregistered anomalies. The first was the HPOE resource that contained the JPEG image. This was documented in 2014 by another researcher of ROM, Pierre Dandumont and MDash; But this discovery did not show that the JPEG file would show if it had removed.
the second, discovered by Brown, was the NITT resource with ID 43, called “NATIVE 4.3”. It turned out to be the code of the PowerPC-Nemolous SCSI Manager 4.3. The SCSI manager was expected to be ordinary, but Brown noticed at the very end of the data some unexpected Pascal strings.
lines referred to “.Edisk”, “Secret rom-imitation” and “The Team”. Brown wrote that the text “Secret Image”, in particular, it seemed that he could be connected with the image that Dudumont discovered, but could not reveal.
“Some quick search on the Internet, looking for the phrase“ Secret Image ROM ”, showed that it was used for Easter eggs with earlier Mac PowerPc,” Brown noted. “On these machines you just had to enter the text, choose it and drag it to the desktop. Then the image will appear. ”
However, this approach did not work with the secret image G3. Then Brown filed an extracted file in Ghidra, a structure for reverse engineering software. After analysis of the code twice, Ghidra was able to detect an electronic disk driver, which will create a disk of RAM.
from code to the picture
remained aigue as to get a buried and secret picture. An employee who monitored the opening of Brown and launched an emulator -based tool called Infinite Mac, came up with the answer: to create and format the RAM disk and give it the name “Secret Image of ROM”.
This creates a disk with RAM that contains one file: a text file called “Team”. Twice to click the file opens the SimpleText, which displays the image. Since then, in other models of that era, various pictures of the Apple team have been discovered.
Brown's post on the opening led to a comment to one of the secret images, Bill Saperstein. He is considered the fourth person on the left in the second row.
“This came from the Easter egg in the original PowerMac, which contained Paula Abdul (of course, without permissions),” said Sapershtein.
The team decided to put himself in Rom G3, but we had to keep it secret, ”he added. Steve Jobs, in the visible, finished practice when he returned to the company in 1997.
