Easter egg image uncovered in Power Mac G3 ROM after 27 years

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.

The secret image of the team that worked on the Power Macintosh G3. Image credit: Doug Brown

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.



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