Downtown Doug Brown
a day ago
- Discovered a 27-year-old easter egg in Power Mac G3 ROM: a hidden JPEG image of the development team called 'The Team'.
- The egg is triggered by naming a RAM disk 'secret ROM image' and then erasing it in the Finder, which extracts the image automatically.
- The mechanism was found by reverse-engineering the SCSI Manager code in the ROM using Ghidra, revealing Pascal strings like 'secret ROM image' and 'The Team'.
- The trick works on Mac OS 8.1 through 9.0.4 but stops working in 9.1.
- The egg was created by the G3 team (led by Bill, who commented) as a secret tribute after Apple banned easter eggs in 1997; the team was a small skunkworks group that developed the G3 line.
- The post credits ^alex for discovering the erase-disk trick and includes instructions to reproduce the egg in Infinite Mac emulator.