The Lost Japanese ROM of the Macintosh Plus
28 comments
·May 17, 2025zdw
phire
Apple actually shipped the Mac Classic with a built-in romdisk, accessed by holding command+option+x+o
They had enough room left in the 512KB ROM to fit a 357KB boot disk a stripped down System 6.0.3 and a few useful tools (MacsBug and AppleShare Prep)
nxobject
For what it’s worth, this wasn’t the first Japanese-localized Mac with Kanji fonts - Canon modified a 512k Mac by adding an extra ROM board and called ugh the Dynamac.
hoherd
Coincidentally I had never heard of KanjiTalk until earlier this week when I stumbled across it on infinite mac.
msephton
I'm the nerd that requested this be added to Infinite Mac, as there's a lot of great Japanese software. :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43607153
JKCalhoun
Wild. There was a Japanese port of Glider 4.0 to Japanese. (Sadly I have only the box and manual, no floppy. I am not sure I ever had it — be nice to find that rare binary out there.)
npunt
If you ever find it, folks at https://68kmla.org should be able to help
ChilledTonic
The fact that this was machine translated was surprising as it was remarkably readable! Interesting how far that tech has come while I wasn’t looking.
dwood_dev
LLMs are quite good at translation. You can even instruct them to use different linguistic styles and regional idioms.
They are also quite good at translating poorly written and only semi coherent writing, which can be incredibly useful if the person you are communicating with is quite sloppy.
AnotherGoodName
To be clear, it's the original purpose of LLMs.
The whole LLM scene today came about because context was really important to translations. The "attention is all you need" paper was by the Google Translation team as they came up with ideas to improve how to map context of words and carry them across in translations.
At some point people started asking the translation to "translate from English to English as if you're an AI assistant".
Anyway it shouldn't surprise anyone that LLMs are good at translation. The real surprise to everyone is how powerful translation engines that understood context could be!
pests
One distinction is the original transformer was an encoder/decoder while (most?) LLMs today are encoder only.
The translation transformer also was able to peek ahead in the context window while (most?) LLM's now only consider previous tokens.
jimbokun
It also makes sense that they would be good at translating from English to programming languages, for the same reasons.
TMWNN
>They are also quite good at translating poorly written and only semi coherent writing, which can be incredibly useful if the person you are communicating with is quite sloppy.
You see this with recent automated translation on YouTube. If the creator of (say) an English-language video doesn't upload subtitles, YouTube automatically creates them based on the audio, but they lack punctuation and have nonsense phrases. The AI-driven translation of those subtitles to other languages cleans up the text along the way, so the end result is that non-English speakers get better subtitles than English speakers.
userbinator
I read your comment after the article and didn't believe it. JP>EN is one of the trickiest pairs for MT and there are usually interesting phrases, understandable but distinctive, that would appear even if an actual human did it.
Pfiffer
It was originally written in french
userbinator
That makes sense, FR>EN is far easier and even Google Translate has been doing a decent job of that for a long time.
null
charcircuit
[flagged]
linguae
I understand what you're saying, but I wonder how many software products, particularly those from the early days of personal computing, have been lost to history due to nobody copying them before the media got deteriorated or destroyed. Sure, there will always be copies of WordPerfect 5.1 and MS-DOS 6.22 floating around, legal and not-so-legal. However, there is some old software that is difficult to find, often in situations where not many copies were sold.
I wish our copyright laws (I'm in the United States) were more considerate of the needs of computer historians and retrocomputing enthusiasts. 95 years is much too long of a copyright term for software that gets obsolete after 10-20 years. I can understand lengthy copyrights for video games, since they are works of art and since there is a lot of commercial value in old games. However, would Mac OS 9 and Windows 98 being in the public domain threaten sales of modern Macs and Windows 11 licenses? Would WordPerfect 5.1 for MS-DOS being in the public domain hurt Corel's business? While I do believe it's possible to get licenses to old versions of Microsoft software through certain MSDN subscription programs, many software companies don't sell licenses of older software products.
While I'm on the topic, there used to be a museum in Seattle named The Living Computer Museum where visitors could actually use old computers. I went there in 2019 and had a wonderful time; it's sad that it didn't survive the COVID-19 pandemic. I wonder, though, how much work (if any) was done with securing legal licenses for the software on these old computers, since I'd imagine that a museum would have a liability problem if it was caught using pirated software. Given that the museum was founded by the late Paul Allen, it is likely that the museum may have worked out some agreements with the copyright holders of various software tools. After all, it's not like the museum was reselling the software or the hardware.
TMWNN
>I wish our copyright laws (I'm in the United States) were more considerate of the needs of computer historians and retrocomputing enthusiasts. 95 years is much too long of a copyright term for software that gets obsolete after 10-20 years.
Reposting my proposals regarding copyright:
Any content, once published/distributed/broadcast in the US, that is not made readily available to the public going forward loses copyright protection. This includes revisions.
* A film, TV show, sound recording, book, or any other copyrighted content must, once made available for public purchase, always remain available. If the only streaming service willing to pay to stream your movie has the smallest market share, too bad; the market has spoken on the value of your content. An ebook can fulfill this purpose for a print book; streaming can fulfill this purpose for a theatrical or physical-media film. But it must be available to maintain copyright.
* Compulsory licensing should apply; if Netflix wants to pay the same amount of money as the above-mentioned small market-share streaming service for the film, Netflix must be allowed to do so. The film's rights owner can demand more, raising the price for all, but if every outlet refuses, the film immediately goes into public domain. This process is reversible, but it would set a ceiling to prevent the owner from setting a ridiculously high price to prevent its availability.
* If a Blu-ray of a film or TV show has excised or modified scenes for whatever reason, and the original isn't also made available (whether on a different "theatrical cut" release, or as a different cut on the same disc), the entire original version immediately goes into public domain.
* If NBC posts Saturday Night Live skits on YouTube that have removed "problematic" scenes[1] without explaining the differences—a diff file, basically—the entire original skit loses copyright protection.
Separate issue, but also very worthwhile:
* Streaming services must make all data regarding their content available in some standardized format. Consumers should be able to use one application to access all content they have access to. The creator of SmartTube (a very nice YouTube-compatible player) should be able to add the appropriate API support to search for and play Netflix/Prime Video/Disney+/Paramount+ content.
The above applies to software, too. Legalize abandonware!
[1] Something I understand already happens
>While I'm on the topic, there used to be a museum in Seattle named The Living Computer Museum where visitors could actually use old computers. I went there in 2019 and had a wonderful time; it's sad that it didn't survive the COVID-19 pandemic.
The museum closed because of COVID-19, but the real reason it did not reopen is because Allen did not create a dedicated endowment, and his sister and only heir was uninterested in maintaining the museum.
tom_
I wonder what the chance would be of getting a replacement ROM from Apple? For items of this age, even when the original vendor is still in business the distinction is typically moot.
(Maybe I'm wrong and they'd do it though! But I'd put a non-zero probability on them doing it starting by downloading the images from this guy's site.)
eschaton
Apple almost certainly has both the raw ROM image and the source code in their archive. Remember, in the past they’ve shared things like the original QuickDraw, MacPaint, and Lisa operating system and Office System source code.
tom_
That's a good point, though it's not like they'd be able to release stuff that they'd lost.
(What the chances are of things getting lost - who knows. Apple may well be unusually well-organised. But my bet stands. There are a lot of non-zero values.)
WalterGR
Where is it being non-publicly shared?
There's also a 1MB EEPROM mod you can do on a Mac Plus that gives you a built-in ramdisk: https://www.bigmessowires.com/mac-rom-inator/
I wonder if one could put this larger ROM, and the other files into a custom built image so no swaps are required.