Customizing the startup chime on a 1999 G3 iMac

https://www.downtowndougbrown.com/2023/03/customizing-the-startup-chime-on-a-1999-g3-imac/

by zdw • 3 years ago

76 23 3 years ago

The unashamed scream of delight and joy from the guy on the video whose startup sound has been patched. Just so relatable! That’s why we do this folks. So satisfying.

lproven• 3 years ago

Yup. It's poorly filmed, but the reaction makes it 100% worth it. :-)

mechanicalpulse• 3 years ago

This reminds me of using a hex editor on the version of explorer.exe that shipped with Windows 95 to change the infamous "Start" menu text to something else. I think the only requirement was that its replacement also needed to be five characters. That's nowhere near as convoluted as changing the startup chime, but amusing nonetheless.

Thanks for the memory.

isaacdl• 3 years ago

Oh yeah, I did that too! I also spent a ton of time adding/making custom boot screens for various versions of Windows (up through XP, at least). Was a lot more interesting than it would be today because those boot splash screens were often up for several minutes (!) while the OS started.

mikepurvis• 3 years ago

Oh man, I definitely remember doing that with Windows 95 and 98— there was one that had the caption "this is Windows on drugs" with the palette rotation used to animate a bunch of psychedelic paisley.

tambourine_man• 3 years ago

ResEdit was a good friend for Mac users as well

dylan604• 3 years ago

ResEdit was one of those tools that if a Mac didn't have it, that Mac was broken to me.

kitsunesoba2• 3 years ago

Thanks to ResEdit my OS 8/9 setups and several of the apps on them were heavily modded. One of the most extensively changed was a copy of Netscape Communicator 4.x that had just about every icon and instance of branding text swapped out for something custom.

Did those mods serve any practical purpose? Not really, but it was fun.

poglet• 3 years ago

As a kid I used to change the "It is now safe to turn off your computer" message. From memory it was just an image file so you could put all sorts of funny messages there.

bitwize• 3 years ago

I used to patch command.com to display a different initialization message.

I thought I was l33t.

camhenlin• 3 years ago

I had an NT4 workstation, a hex editor, and no internet connection at my first job. I spent a lot of time modifying the text in explorer.exe, calc.exe, and other apps. It was a lot of fun and definitely helped me understand the tip of the iceberg regarding how hex editors work.

incanus77• 3 years ago

Add to “places I did not expect to read about Forth” list.

butz• 3 years ago

Warning! First sound is VERY loud. This should be noted in bold or huge red letters, as some blockheads like me like to click on audio first, before reading.

dougg3• 3 years ago

Sorry about that! I was definitely aware of the volume and tried to warn, but it wasn't obvious enough. I bolded the text to make it more obvious.

netsharc• 3 years ago

I remember running into a FileMaker database file which contained a list of all Mac hardware, including playable embedded AIFF files of what their startup chimes sounded like.

I feel like a librarian in the Library of Babel talking about the pre-prehistoric Internet.

Then again, maybe it was an old version the MacTracker app: https://mactracker.ca

LeoPanthera• 3 years ago

The Mactracker app has a "hidden" feature (I think it is documented, but no-one reads that) - if you option-click on the Mac icons it plays the crash noise instead of the startup noise.

Only older Macs have crash noises, they went away after a while.

metadat• 3 years ago

Also discussed 2 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35026257 (12 comments)

themodelplumber• 3 years ago

Lovely. Nice job!

It'd be cool to be able to hear the final sound file on the site too, as it's a bit lost in the room dynamics, but maybe I missed that...

userbinator• 3 years ago

This data seems correct! 0xE4C4 is a reasonable length for the sound

That's the most surprising part --- Apple spent almost 64K just for a startup chime, and stored it as raw (compressed, but ADPCM is a very minimal compression algorithm if it could even be called that) audio! The entire BIOS flash is 1MB[1] which also seems like an extravagant size for 1999. PC BIOSes of the time would be either 128KB, 256KB or in rare cases (or dual-BIOS) 512KB.

Of course, PCs usually had a single beep instead of an elaborate sound, but I have a Pentium II mobo that plays a monophonic rendition of the "Intel sound" through the PC speaker.

[1] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/imac-g3-tray-bootrom-du...

jjoonathan• 3 years ago

That boot sound was magical, even moreso with case reverb. It was space well spent!

Speaking of G3 iMac nostalgia, there's a modern Bugdom port on github: https://github.com/jorio/Bugdom

Thanks, everyone in this scene, you are helping me relive some beautiful childhood memories.

fredoralive• 3 years ago

The 1MB ROM isn’t the largest it’s been, traditionally parts of the (classic) Mac OS had been in ROM, and by the PowerPC era it was up to 4MB. The first iMac was the first Mac to move the OS parts out of ROM and into a file loaded from disk into RAM. 1MB is still bigger than PC, but it was more sophisticated with the Forth stuff, network booting (which would be an extra option ROM on the PC) etc.

In the case of ADPCM, there’s probably a trade off between size of the sound data vs the size / complexity of the decompression algorithm itself. Nothing apart from the startup sound probably uses the decoder (especially as the chimes of death / car crash noises were replaced with beeps from the iMac onwards) so the whole thing probably has to be counted together.

Customizing the startup chime on a 1999 G3 iMac

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