Software engineer Doug Brown has successfully unlocked a long-standing mystery by revealing how to access a hidden photo of the Power Mac G3 development team embedded in its ROM. The image, first identified in 2014 by Pierre Dandumont, was inaccessible for 27 years until Brown’s reverse engineering efforts uncovered the method. The discovery highlights the ongoing fascination with old technology and the potential for innovation in reverse engineering. Brown’s work began while exploring the ROM using a hex editor and Eric Harmon’s Mac ROM template, tools that allowed deeper inspection of the system’s firmware. During his exploration, he noticed both the HPOE resource containing the JPEG image of the team members and a series of peculiar Pascal strings within the PowerPC-native SCSI Manager 4.3 code. These strings, including ‘.Edisk,’ ‘secret ROM image,’ and ‘The Team,’ were significant clues in understanding the activation process.
After extracting and disassembling the code using Ghidra, Brown realized that the SCSI Manager code was checking for a RAM disk named ‘secret ROM image.’ When found, it would create a file named ‘The Team’ containing the JPEG data. Initially, Brown shared his findings on the #mac68k IRC channel, where user Alex quickly contributed to refining the activation method. The trick involves enabling the RAM Disk in the Memory control panel, restarting the system, selecting the RAM Disk icon, and formatting it with the text ‘secret ROM image.’ Once completed, simply double-clicking the ‘The Team’ file with SimpleText opens the hidden photo of the development team. This discovery not only satisfies curiosity but also underscores the importance of preserving and understanding legacy technology, offering a glimpse into the collaborative efforts and creative processes behind early computer hardware development.