Software engineer Doug Brown has uncovered how to access a secret Easter egg hidden in the Power Mac G3’s ROM: a photo of the development team that had been inaccessible for 27 years.
While the JPEG image itself was first documented by Pierre Dandumont in 2014, the method to display it on the computer remained unknown until Brown’s reverse engineering work.
Using a hex editor named Hex Fiend and Eric Harmon’s Mac ROM template, Brown explored resources within the beige Power Mac G3’s ROM, used in desktop, minitower, and all-in-one models from 1997 to 1999. He discovered two key elements: the HPOE resource holding the JPEG image and a set of Pascal strings within the PowerPC-native SCSI Manager 4.3 code referencing “.Edisk,” “secret ROM image,” and “The Team.”
These strings hinted at the activation process. After disassembling the code with Ghidra, Brown found that the SCSI Manager checks for a RAM disk volume named “secret ROM image.” When detected, it generates a file called “The Team” containing the hidden JPEG.
Brown shared his findings on the #mac68k IRC channel, where a user named Alex quickly identified the activation procedure: enable the RAM Disk in the Memory control panel, restart, select the RAM Disk icon, choose “Erase Disk” from the Special menu, and enter “secret ROM image” as the format name. This sequence triggers the display of the concealed photo.