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Finding a 27-year-old easter egg in the Power Mac G3 ROM


I was recently poking around inside the original Power Macintosh G3’s ROM and accidentally discovered an easter egg that nobody has documented until now. This story starts with me on a lazy Sunday using Hex Fiend in conjunction with Eric Harmon’s Mac ROM template (ROM Fiend) to look through the resources stored in the Power Mac G3’s ROM.

The second thing I found was a big clue: I kept looking for other interesting information in the ROM, and eventually I stumbled upon nitt resource ID 43, named “Native 4.3”. Some quick Internet searching for the phrase “secret ROM image” revealed that it had been used for easter eggs with earlier PowerPC Macs. There was one problem, though: it didn’t detect any references to the “secret ROM image” string, other than inside of a huge list of pointers to variables.

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