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Finding a 27-year-old easter egg in the Power Mac G3 ROM

(www.downtowndougbrown.com)
388 points zdw | 1 comments | 24 Jun 25 13:06 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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MortyWaves ◴[24 Jun 25 15:13 UTC] No.44367124[source]▶
It's really bugging me that he somehow reads "The Team" but not the full string "The Team Break at Event Match - Native" whatever that means.
replies(2): >>44367228 #>>44367260 #
1. pimlottc ◴[24 Jun 25 15:23 UTC] No.44367228[source]▶
These are two separate strings. You can see in the hexdump that the character between them is not a space (0x20) but an unprintable control character (0x1D). The article refers to these as "Pascal strings". Unlike C-style strings, they are not null-terminated, but instead are length-prefixed [0]; the first byte of the string stores the length of the string.

So you can see that "The Team" is indeed a single string, starting with the length of 8 (encoded as 0x08), followed by the string "Break at Event Match - Native" with length of 29 (encoded as 0x1D)

0: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25068903/what-are-pascal...