Ghosts in the ROM

While digging through dumps generated from the Apple Mac SE ROM images we noticed that there was a large amount of non-code, non-audio data. Adam Mayer tested different stride widths and found that at 67 bytes (536 pixels across) there appeared to be some sort of image data that clearly was a picture of people. The rest of the image was skewed and distorted, so we knew that it wasn’t stored as an uncompressed bitmap.

After some investigation, we were able to decode the scrambled mess above and turn it into the full image with a hidden message from “Thu, Nov 20, 1986“:

Mac SE engineers (0x1D93C)

Read on for the reverse engineering details of how we recovered this and the other three photographs stored in the ROM, and some information about the Motorola 68000 era Macintosh.

This was first reported in 1985...

The Mac Plus and SE all had digitised images of the development team in the ROM.

You used to press the Interrupt button on the side of the machine (optional add-on for developers, was provided with each Mac, but not attached to the case) and jump to a specific memory location and then the slideshow of the developers would appear.