[kabdib]

Shipping ROMs was the same deal. You wrote an OS, or a game, and tested the crap out of it. Then you sent out for mask ROMs and waited like six weeks for them to come back, and you hoped that they worked.

My office mate was told to make three versions of the game she worked on, each ORG'd at a different address so that manufacturing could pick whichever configuration was cheaper to make. Q/A was able to test two of those, but didn't have the special test cartridge needed to test the third, and guess which one had a fatal error and didn't boot? $250K of ROMs wound up in the dump (next to E.T., for all I know).

We wrote a boot ROM for a consumer computer. We were pretty sure it worked, but again we lacked some hardware and had to ship the final version out for mask ROMs without testing. They came back and worked. I told the hardware test manager what we'd done, and it was the first time I'd ever seen someone turn white.

Newton was the same deal (except that we had a way to patch the ROMs through a snazzy jump table system).

[yuhong]

Newton was the same deal (except that we had a way to patch the ROMs through a snazzy jump table system).

In fact, I think the classic Mac OS used this model too.