From Newsgroup: comp.sys.mac.vintage



Easter egg image uncovered in Power Mac G3 ROM after 27 years
-------------------------------------------------------------
The secret image of the team that worked on the Power Macintosh G3.

A self-described computer geek has revealed a previously secret
"easter egg" image file buried in the ROM code of the 27-year-old
Power Macintosh G3 that shows the team that worked on the project.

Image:
<https://photos5.appleinsider.com/gallery/64180-133661-The-Team-xl.jpg>

Doug Brown, who maintains a blog that documents his experiments and
research into older computers, said that he accidentally discovered
the Easter egg while looking through resources in the Power Mac
G3's ROM. This model was made by Apple between November 1997 and
August 1999.

The same ROM was used for the minitower, all-in-one, and beige
desktop models. Brown said he was spending "a lazy Sunday" using a
pair of tools called ROM Fiend and Hex Fiend to look through the
G3's ROM resources.

He shortly spotted two undocumented anomalies. The first was a
resource of type HPOE that contained a JPEG image. This had been
documented in 2014 by another ROM researcher, Pierre Dandumont -
but that discovery did not reveal what the JPEG file would show if
extracted.

The second, discovered by Brown, was a nitt resource with ID 43,
named "Native 4.3." This turned out to be the PowerPC-native SCSI
Manager 4.3 code. The SCSI manager was expected and routine, but
Brown noticed at the very end of the data some unexpected Pascal
strings.

The strings made reference to ".Edisk," "secret ROM image," and
"The Team." Brown wrote that "the "secret ROM image" text in
particular seemed like it could be related to the picture Dandumont
had uncovered, but was unable to reveal.

"Some quick Internet searching for the phrase 'secret ROM image'
revealed that it had been used for Easter eggs with earlier PowerPC
Macs," Brown noted. "On those machines, you just had to type the
text, select it, and drag it to the desktop. Then, the picture
would appear."

However, that approach didn't work with the secret G3 image. Brown
then fed the extracted file into Ghidra, a framework for software
reverse engineering. After analyzing the code twice, Ghidra was
able to discover an e-disk driver, which would create a RAM disk.

From code to picture
It remained a mystery as to how to get the buried and secret picture
to display. A collaborator who was following Brown's discovery and
running a browser-based emulator tool called Infinite Mac came up
with the answer: create and format the RAM disk, and give it the
name of "secret ROM image."

This creates a RAM disk that contains a single file: a text file
called "The Team." Double-clicking the file opens SimpleText, which
displays the image. Since then, various Apple team pictures have
been discovered in other models from that era.

Brown's post on the discovery led to a comment by one of the people
pictured in the first of the secret images, Bill Saperstein. He is
seen as the fourth person from the left in the second row.

"This resulted from an Easter egg in the original PowerMac that
contained Paula Abdul (without permissions, of course)," Saperstein
noted.

The team opted to put a picture of themselves in the ROM of the G3,
"but we had to keep it very secret," he added. Steve Jobs apparently
ended the practice when he returned to the company in 1997.



<https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/06/28/easter-egg-image-uncovered-in-power-mac-g3-rom-after-27-years>





--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2