Macintosh ROM Easter Egg - Macintosh BIOS Sound

A student in the Mac Lab I run at the school I work at found this for me the day--I've never been more surprised by a computer than by this sound. I was *not* expecting it!!! Proof that macs are silly little creatures. :-)

Actually, these are the Mac's infamous "Chimes of Death" these, if heard when you don't purposely invoke the easter egg, mean somethng is terribly wrong with your mac. It could be a loose RAM module or much, much worse... but makes for a good egg when you do this on purpose :-)

You can do the same thing on the Quadra 950 (and probably any other Mac with a programmer's switch) by pressing the programmer's switch as soon as it powers up. (The programmer's switch, at least on the Q950, is the button above the power button on the case that has a symbol on it that resembles a V)

Whoa! Works a bit different on an iBook. After hearing the boot tone and hitting Apple + Reset, the machine drops to full screen text mode and dumps me into Open Firmware: Welcome to Open Firmware. To continue booting, type "mac-boot" and press return. To shut down, type "shut-down" and press return. OK 0 > _ I don't know much about Mac BIOS, anyone know anything cool one can do/break from here? :)

Followup: Other folks probably already knew this, but Open Firmware appears to be the same as Sun's OpenBoot. Once you've hit the command prompt on the iBook, the commands are the same. Type 'print-env' to see a list of settings. Warning, like on a Sun, you can do BAD things from this prompt.

In regards to the iBook: does this Open Firmware screen come up if you press the command(aka apple) and power(aka reset) when the machine has already booted up? (If it does, then you didn't do the the key combination soon enough to hear the "chimes of death".) Also, when referring to macs, don't call it a BIOS. I hate it when macs are compared to PC's this way. Call it a Startup Rom.

Hey, this brings back sooo many memories. We had a computer lab of all macs of the same kind where this worked. We found that doing so right after turning it on had one chime, and I think that if you continue to hold it was the way that we got a different one. It doesnt work on the new i-macs or g3's though so well have to find other annoying things to do to the teacher. Anyone have ideas? I think this does represent, as mentioned before, that there is a problem. The different types of sounds that we got may represent different problems, like the different beeps that a bios makes on a pc to represent different problems. Using the programmer's window on startup has a fun things to do too. you can cause it to have some quicktime error after and before quicktime loads, and theres at least one error with a negative number to represent the error. sorry, but i do not remember what was typed to cause the error since we had the new macs this year so i couldnt play with it anymore.

Has anyone got this one to work on a Mac SE? I first tried the "pressing the programmer's switch as soon as it powers up" method, as suggested by [email protected], and all I got was a sad mac, and nothing more. So then I tried the "CONTROL+OPEN APPLE(The command key)+RESET ,OPEN APPLE + RESET keys several times." method, and all it did was reset :(

Ummm, the Open firmware thingy is supposed to be accessed by Cmd-Opt-O-F, not a NMI Cmd-Pwr... And its not an easter egg, its a bootloader :)

Apple quit using the so called "Crash beep" after they introduced PowerMac G3. No Mac newer than PowerMac 9600 has the crash sound. Although, not every old mac had it. You can find everything about older macs with "Apple Spec" You get the startup sounds, and the crash sounds there too.

I got a different sound on a Quadra 650 than usual. On a Quadra 900 all I got was "Sorry, a system error occurred. RAM parity (Restart button)". Is this a bug or a joke, because you should have parity RAM.

Ok, the SE and almost the entire line of compact macs had no sad mac sound, to my knowledge, the color classic one & two were the only comp. macs with one. The G3 DOES have a sad mac sound, the only way to invoke it is to have an actual problem, I'm not sure about the G4, but I would think same, same. Now for O.F., you can do a massive amount of damage to a mac by messing with Open Firmware, I suggest NOT fooling around with it! In fact, you can put a password up to where the mac wont boot with out it, if you are interested or want to drive some one you dont like (computer teacher? J/K) crazy, search securemac.com for it. As for the Q900, I've read that the mother board on it was built very oddly, causing different odd, minor, and some major problems that were fixed in the Q950, even at start up, mine used ro get random sad macs reading FFFFFFFF 99999999, I'd restart and it would be fine. with a mac, never assume, think different. :-)

Dont use that boot password improperly, ok? If you did it to the wrong person, i.e. "computer teacher", you could get fined a good deal, and even more if somthing goes wrong. I use it for my own securety, thats why I told you about it, if its stolen or someone wants to "look" at your private stuff. since they dont make locks on macs for keyboards and the similar, thats quite use full.

This egg does not work on a Performa 6360. How do I know this? Simply because I own a 6360. Any modifications that will allow me to hear the "death chimes?" ;-)

The only other way to invoke this on a non-Compact Mac is to loosen a RAM chip, or bust your poor machine. Sorry compact Mac users, no Chimes of Death sounds for you! ;_;

In Open Firmware, you can get your computer to be a little speedier by resetting some RAM (your NVRAM [non-volatile RAM] and all RAM without critical information stored in it. Step 1: in OF, type "reset-nvram" (without quotes;) press Return. Step 2a: type "reset-all" (no quotes) and press return. (If you choose to do this step, your Mac should reboot by itself. If not, proceed to 2b.) Step 2b: Type "mac-boot" (no quote) and press Return to continue booting. Resetting RAM can be further done by holding Cmd+Opt+P+R during startup, then immediately switching to O and F after the startup chime is heard a second time. (All this RAM resetting is good for your computer, however some settings are returned to default when performed.)

I've gotten this to work on a Mac Plus. Interrupt switch (aka programmers key) gives the poor (emulated) thing a sad mac. Also works on a real Mac Plus.