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Revisiting the Macintosh ROM Easter Egg
eldavojohn writes "NYCResistor has published photos of what they call 'Ghosts in the ROM' after dumping Apple Mac SE ROM images from a roadside Motorola 68000-era Macintosh and looking at all the data (they mention an Easter egg reference to this from 1999). They go into some nice detail about the strategy for extracting this data from a discarded unit and noticing structure. There's also other data that they weren't able to identify, which causes one to wonder how many other Easter eggs are lying about in various ROM chips and what modern Easter eggs must be shipping with software/hardware today."
My first easter egg was in the old Atari console game "Adventure". If you found a hidden room and carried a magic one-pixel sprite (dot) into that room, it displayed the name of the programmer.
Of course once Atari learned about it they had a fit because they wanted programmers to remain anonymous, and that's one of the reasons four programmers quit Atari and founded Activision. They wanted name credit for their artistic creations.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
my favorite easter egg was in the early amiga 'rom' (kickstart) -
if you held down both shift keys, both ctrl keys, one of the function keys, then inserted a floppy disk,
the screen would briefly flash "the amiga - we made it, commodore fucked it up'.
One man's easter egg can easily be another man's malware. This sounds kind of cool, until you realise there could be any number of malicious "easter eggs".
Um, no. Easter eggs and malware are completely separate camps. By the time you hit upon an easter egg, you've already committed to trusting a progammer's intentions and work quality. Discovering he or she has a sense of humor too does not cause injury to you. By the same token, a virus is a virus, even if it plays a cute animation.
While you imply that we should regard easter eggs with a certain suspicion, I gather what's really making you uncomfortable is the fact that there's hidden functionality in that binary you're running. Guess what... easter eggs or not, most software is loaded with hidden functionality: easter eggs, diagnostic functions, test code, old screens, unused modules, compatibility modes, experimental features, platform-specific and customer-specific hacks, and, yes, sometimes malware. Easter eggs have merely made you reexamine some false assumptions you had.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction