After 27 Years, Engineer Discovers How To Display Secret Photo In Power Mac ROM (arstechnica.com) 10
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Tuesday, software engineer Doug Brown published his discovery of how to trigger a long-known but previously inaccessible Easter egg in the Power Mac G3's ROM: a hidden photo of the development team that nobody could figure out how to display for 27 years. While Pierre Dandumont first documented the JPEG image itself in 2014, the method to view it on the computer remained a mystery until Brown's reverse engineering work revealed that users must format a RAM disk with the text "secret ROM image."
Brown stumbled upon the image while using a hex editor tool called Hex Fiend with Eric Harmon's Mac ROM template to explore the resources stored in the beige Power Mac G3's ROM. The ROM appeared in desktop, minitower, and all-in-one G3 models from 1997 through 1999. "While I was browsing through the ROM, two things caught my eye," Brown wrote. He found both the HPOE resource containing the JPEG image of team members and a suspicious set of Pascal strings in the PowerPC-native SCSI Manager 4.3 code that included ".Edisk," "secret ROM image," and "The Team."
The strings provided the crucial clue Brown needed. After extracting and disassembling the code using Ghidra, he discovered that the SCSI Manager was checking for a RAM disk volume named "secret ROM image." When found, the code would create a file called "The Team" containing the hidden JPEG data. Brown initially shared his findings on the #mac68k IRC channel, where a user named Alex quickly figured out the activation method. The trick requires users to enable the RAM Disk in the Memory control panel, restart, select the RAM Disk icon, choose "Erase Disk" from the Special menu, and type "secret ROM image" into the format dialog. "If you double-click the file, SimpleText will open it," Brown explains on his blog just before displaying the hidden team photo that emerges after following the steps.
Brown stumbled upon the image while using a hex editor tool called Hex Fiend with Eric Harmon's Mac ROM template to explore the resources stored in the beige Power Mac G3's ROM. The ROM appeared in desktop, minitower, and all-in-one G3 models from 1997 through 1999. "While I was browsing through the ROM, two things caught my eye," Brown wrote. He found both the HPOE resource containing the JPEG image of team members and a suspicious set of Pascal strings in the PowerPC-native SCSI Manager 4.3 code that included ".Edisk," "secret ROM image," and "The Team."
The strings provided the crucial clue Brown needed. After extracting and disassembling the code using Ghidra, he discovered that the SCSI Manager was checking for a RAM disk volume named "secret ROM image." When found, the code would create a file called "The Team" containing the hidden JPEG data. Brown initially shared his findings on the #mac68k IRC channel, where a user named Alex quickly figured out the activation method. The trick requires users to enable the RAM Disk in the Memory control panel, restart, select the RAM Disk icon, choose "Erase Disk" from the Special menu, and type "secret ROM image" into the format dialog. "If you double-click the file, SimpleText will open it," Brown explains on his blog just before displaying the hidden team photo that emerges after following the steps.
Thank you Slashdot (Score:3)
Who is... (Score:1)
...the Oriental cutie in the red top? She has a very saucy look on her face.
Re: Who is... (Score:2)
Who is... living so far in the past that they use the term "Oriental"?
Old news (Score:3, Informative)
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/2... [hackaday.com]
HackADay already posted this 2 days earlier.
Re: (Score:2)
So it's "old news" if you read Hack a Day daily?
That's such a miniscule portion of this site, much less the population.
I truly don't understand the "I saw this already" posts. What drives them?
Re: (Score:3)
On one hand, people who care about this stuff read Hack a Day.
On the other hand, Slashdot has never even tried to break news. That's not what it's for. It's a place for nerds to discuss nerd shit.
Re: (Score:1)
Although... to be fair, there have been a couple things I submitted to HAD that they never picked up.
But, there is a fair amount of Slashdot that is news from several days before it makes it to the front page here. And, I agree that this is more of a place where we can discuss stuff in (closer) to real-time (although most discussions somehow end up being a pro-Trump VS anti-Trump discussion... even stuff that has nothing to do with him).
I tend to check both, along with a couple local news sites and CNN and
I have an even better one (Score:1)
This one dates back to 1952: There is a lot of empty space between Earth and Mars, but one day you may discover the black teapot that B. Russell placed out there.
Egg-shaped (Score:2)
Hat tip to whomever decided to mask the portraits with egg-shaped ovals for the Easter egg.