Ha, yeah! There are so many different variants of New World Macs. I hope that getting the G3 to play a custom chime will help open up the door for people to figure out the rest of the New World Macs.
Some of them have firmware updates that Apple released. I'm assuming those will be the ones with the best chance of getting a custom chime. The ones that have never had a firmware update are probably capable of accepting a firmware update, but the jury is still out on whether it will actually be possible to flash them without sample Forth code showing how to update their firmware.
I'm in the middle of learning Forth. It's not half bad of a language! I can see why it's used -- it's pretty flexible and easy to parse. Once I'm done with learning Forth and completely figuring out what every line of the firmware update script does, I'll try to flash a custom chime to a G3 B&W. I already know exactly what I want to try, but I want to make sure there isn't a checksum somewhere that would ruin everything.
I've dumped the 1 MB boot ROM on all of my New World Macs (G3 Blue and White, Lombard PB G3, iMac G4, Mac mini G4) and they all store the startup chime in the same format--in fact, the bytes are exactly the same on all of them. That's a good sign that this should be possible on other Macs! I think for starters it will probably be best to stick with replacing the old chime with a chime that's exactly the same length. (We can pad a shorter sound with silence to make it the same length)
Some of them have firmware updates that Apple released. I'm assuming those will be the ones with the best chance of getting a custom chime. The ones that have never had a firmware update are probably capable of accepting a firmware update, but the jury is still out on whether it will actually be possible to flash them without sample Forth code showing how to update their firmware.
I'm in the middle of learning Forth. It's not half bad of a language! I can see why it's used -- it's pretty flexible and easy to parse. Once I'm done with learning Forth and completely figuring out what every line of the firmware update script does, I'll try to flash a custom chime to a G3 B&W. I already know exactly what I want to try, but I want to make sure there isn't a checksum somewhere that would ruin everything.
I've dumped the 1 MB boot ROM on all of my New World Macs (G3 Blue and White, Lombard PB G3, iMac G4, Mac mini G4) and they all store the startup chime in the same format--in fact, the bytes are exactly the same on all of them. That's a good sign that this should be possible on other Macs! I think for starters it will probably be best to stick with replacing the old chime with a chime that's exactly the same length. (We can pad a shorter sound with silence to make it the same length)