Ghosts in the rom (opens in new tab)

According to this link:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/damianward/3300112470/

"The ROM used only 89 KB of the available 256 KB. So to fill the chip, Apple put the photos of the development team into the ROM. To see these photos, press the debug button then type: G 41D89A"

If you're interested in this sort of digital archaeology, check out The Cutting Room Floor: http://tcrf.net/The_Cutting_Room_Floor It's focused on unearthing this sort of thing in games.

There's also a lot of this sort of thing on http://pagetable.com

It blows my mind that those photos was taken over a quarter century ago, hidden by some playful programmers, and are only now unearthed by an entirely different generation of playful programmers. Cool stuff.

See also the "stolen from Apple" icon hidden in the rom for the first Mac.

(http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...)

Back in the heyday of arcade video games, a lot of manufacturers would hide things like this in the code to prevent counterfeiting of the games. PC boards are easy to copy (the schematics were in the service manual), but counterfeiters would just duplicate the ROMs and change a few strings or sprites to give the appearance of a new game. The Easter eggs were triggerable by a certain sequence of moves to show the real authors of the code on-screen.

Here's one example: http://www.digitpress.com/eastereggs/arcaderobotron.htm

They were known about back in the day as well.. we all saw them because of fantastic mac shareware mags, macworld, etc.. they just haven't been seen in a while.

Previously: "The Joy of Dumping" -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4150668

Where's Steve?