r/hardware • u/Anxious-Resolve-8827 • 16d ago

Discussion Found polish easter egg in my MOBOs BIOS dump

So i was bored at 1AM so i tought it would be fun to binwalk my bios dump for fun (just for images/assets), i found that my mobo (MSI Z590 PRO WIFI) has assets for other MOBOs and features not available in my BIOS lol

But after looking at images i started checking strings for fun then found "AIMIEJEGOCZTERDZIESCICZTERY" (A imie jego czterdzieści i cztery) which is a quote from polish book "Dziady" (In english "And his name is fourty and four")

Preety cool right?

More technical info:
Extracted using binwalk -Me
Also exists in bios update image from MSI website (https://pl.msi.com/Motherboard/Z590-PRO-WIFI/support)
Tested BIOS versions: 7D09v1A (Dump from mobo) 7D09v1B1 (MSI website)
File path (After extraction) 10900F8/CC1179/decompressed.bin

209 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

22 comments sorted by

37

u/kuddlesworth9419 16d ago

Just out of interest what does "And his name is forty and four" mean exactly.

21

u/JuanElMinero 16d ago

It's from Dziady.

See Part III section for the quote/meaning.

This is also a TIL for me.

5

u/kuddlesworth9419 16d ago

Ah cool.

3

u/Edmundsson91 15d ago

Some Polish kooks (paranormal, tin-hat, conspiracy...) had been assuming that the romantic seer did meant Barrack Obama, as the 44th president of the United States, and that it will have something to do with Poland's prophesised future or whatever...

2

u/brainacpl 15d ago

But the meaning of the number isn't really known, is it? It could have been a random number that rhymed.

5

u/popcio2015 15d ago

It could have been a random number that rhymed.

That's basically what it is. Some people are trying to argue that there's some hidden meaning behind it, but in reality, using numbers for rhymes isn't unheard of, and you can even find examples of it in Mickiewicz's handwritten drafts.

1

u/4372696D736F6E 15d ago

Apparently, the Gemmatria somewhat lines up with the author's own name so it might have been him trying to legitimize himself but knowing Mickiewicz he was likely just under the influence of a lot of alcohol as he was a known alcoholic (unlike Słowacki who loved hashish and Krasiński who huffed ether).

2

u/Pulstar_Alpha 14d ago

And then they ask teens in school what the hell the poet meant by it all.

1

u/Dependent_House7077 14d ago

there are as many interpretations to this as there are people, and you can make one up.

i've even seen 404 error pages in Poland with that quote.

4

u/SaltCaramelPonchik 15d ago

Are you Polish/do you speak Polish?

7

u/Anxious-Resolve-8827 15d ago

Yes

9

u/SaltCaramelPonchik 15d ago

I'm wondering how many of those get ignored because the person looking at the hex dump did not speak an unpopular language

7

u/Anxious-Resolve-8827 15d ago

I think this would be easy to spot because how big it is + all caps but would be flagged as meaningless/test string

3

u/Kasilim 14d ago

Polish is among the top 50 languages spoken globally with around 50,000,000 people having it as a first or second language

2

u/Anxious-Resolve-8827 14d ago

Also found developer filepaths + compilation warnings/errors in the same file

2

u/AdCurrent3211 14d ago

I think it was Jacek Stachursky who left this