New World ROM Macintoshes are the Macintosh models that do not use a Macintosh Toolbox ROM on the motherboard, but instead use a pure Open Firmware implementation similar to Sun Microsystems' OpenBoot.  Macs may be booted into the Open Firmware environment where power users may issue commands for diagnostics, troubleshooting and other purposes.

Booting Into Open Firmware

You can boot your PowerMac into Open Firmware by holding down cmd+option+O+F at boot time.

You can boot your PowerMac into Open Firmware by holding down cmd+option+O+F at boot time.

If you sucessfully boot into Open Firmware, you will be presented with a prompt resembling the following:

 ok
0 >

Resetting Your Password

In Open Firmware, you may reset the password of any account using the command passwd [username].  Eg.:

0 > passwd andre

Once you have changed the password, boot the computer by typing reboot.  You may now log in with your new password.