After 27 Years, Engineer Discovers How To Display Secret Photo In Power Mac ROM

Software engineer Doug Brown has discovered how to trigger a 27-year-old Easter egg in the Power Mac G3's ROM, revealing a hidden photo of the development team. The JPEG image itself was first documented in 2014 by Pierre Dandumont, but the method to view it remained unknown until Brown's reverse engineering work. Brown used a hex editor tool called Hex Fiend and Eric Harmon's Mac ROM template to explore the resources stored in the ROM. He found the HPOE resource containing the JPEG image and suspicious Pascal strings in the PowerPC-native SCSI Manager 4.3 code. The strings included ".Edisk," "secret ROM image," and "The Team," which provided the crucial clue to unlock the Easter egg. Brown discovered that the SCSI Manager was checking for a RAM disk volume named "secret ROM image" and would create a file called "The Team" containing the hidden JPEG data when found. To activate the Easter egg, users must 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. Once the file is created, users can double-click it to open it in SimpleText and view the hidden team photo. Brown initially shared his findings on the #mac68k IRC channel, where a user named Alex quickly figured out the activation method. The discovery has finally unlocked a secret that has been hidden in the Power Mac G3's ROM for nearly three decades.