Mr. Macintosh

[zebo...@yvax.byu.edu]

In 22864.2...@cmhgate.FIDONET.ORG, Kevin asks:

>Does Mr. Macintosh really exist???

Yes, at least in the Macs with 64K ROMs, he did. Mine was undergoing one
of those wonderful crashes, where the screen fills with oatmeal and awful
screeches come from the speaker, when the screen suddenly went black and
four ICON-sized images of a little cartoon head appeared, then after about
two seconds, disappeared. That had to have been Mr. Macintosh. I posted
to this forum a while back asking the same question, and nobody knew. So
I am designing a small program to cruise through the ROMs, funneling all
their contents through an ICON-sized square. I'll get the little bugger's
address if it works, and post it. Maybe even a hex dump of him.

--Lyle D. Gunderson
zebo...@yvax.byu.edu

[Ken McLeod]

In article <817zeb...@yvax.byu.edu> zebo...@yvax.byu.edu writes:
>
>>Does Mr. Macintosh really exist???
>
>Yes, at least in the Macs with 64K ROMs, he did. Mine was undergoing one
>of those wonderful crashes, where the screen fills with oatmeal and awful
>screeches come from the speaker, when the screen suddenly went black and
>four ICON-sized images of a little cartoon head appeared, then after about
>two seconds, disappeared. That had to have been Mr. Macintosh. I posted
>to this forum a while back asking the same question, and nobody knew. So
>I am designing a small program to cruise through the ROMs, funneling all
>their contents through an ICON-sized square. I'll get the little bugger's
>address if it works, and post it. Maybe even a hex dump of him.

Mr. Macintosh is probably not in any ROMs except the original 64K set.
There's another interesting icon hidden in the 128K (Mac Plus & 512e)
ROM; here's a short routine that displays it:

PlotROMIcon(inRect)
Rect *inRect;
{
asm {
BRA.S @2
@1 DC.L 0x40E132 ;address of icon in 128K (Plus) ROM
@2 MOVE.L inRect,-(SP) ;was PEA
PEA @1 ;push "handle"
DC.W 0xA94B ;_PlotIcon
}
}

We've had Mr. Macintosh, the 'stolen' icon, the SE Team Slideshow...
I can just imagine what must be in the new 512K ROMs! :-)

--
========== ....... =============================================
Ken McLeod :. .: UUCP: ...{spsd,zardoz,felix}!dhw68k!thecloud
========== :::.. ..::: INTERNET: thec...@dhw68k.cts.com
//// =============================================

[Frank Leahy]

While I've never heard of a Mr. Mac icon, I do know that there is a
MrMacHook, and it's still there. Mr. MacHook (also known as MBarHook in
InsideMacintosh) is a hook that gets called every time a menu is pulled
down. Late one night, while the Mac was being built, apparently someone
thought it would be funny to have
a little program (the hook) that would count the number of times a menu
was pulled down, and then on the 10,000 th (or some other appropriate
number) time display an animating image (Mr. Macintosh) instead of the
menu. If you look
at the MrMacHook (called such in the original assembly language headers)
parameters, it takes the menu rect, and returns a boolean telling the MDEF
whether to go ahead and draw the menu or not. It could actually be fun to
do an INIT with various MrMacHooks based on birthdays, holidays, etc..

Frank Leahy
(In a former life Mr. MenuManager)
Software Engineering
Apple Computer, Inc.