Arcade Trivia Archive

Reverse-engineering question data from vintage electronic trivia machines, 1983-1987. Plaintext ASCII, base-40 radix, binary trees, 5-bit compression, each game a different puzzle.

113,751 questions
61 games cracked
16 write-ups
1976-1991 era covered

Timeline

1976
Quiz Show pre digital
Kee Games / Atari · First arcade video trivia. Questions on 8-track tapes — no digital data to extract.
1976
Tic Tac Quiz pre digital
Sega · Tic-tac-toe themed quiz. Pre-digital — no ROM dump exists.
1983
Exidy Fax 2 3,617 Q&A ▶
Exidy · Alternate question banks. Same binary tree compression as Fax 1. 4 categories: World Travel, Sports, Movies and TV, Potpourri. 3 difficulty levels.
How was it stored?
World Travel 910 ▶
Movies and TV 904 ▶
Potpourri 904 ▶
Sports 899 ▶
1984
GEI Trivia Series 7 867 Q&A ▶
Greyhound Electronics · Complete Series 7 release. Sex Triv, general, good guys, kids korner chips. (An earlier cut `gtsers7` exists with only 201 records — fully contained in this set; not listed separately.)
How was it stored?
General 200 ▶
TV Dallas 189 ▶
Sex Triv 161 ▶
Kids Korner 160 ▶
Good Guys 157 ▶
1984
GEI Trivia Series A 599 Q&A ▶
Greyhound Electronics · Earlier revision of Series 2 — 89% of these questions also appear in gtsers2, with 66 unique to this cut. Kept for provenance.
How was it stored?
Comics 214 ▶
Sports 195 ▶
Entertainment 190 ▶
1984
Hangman 893 Q&A ▶
Status Game Corporation · Letter-guess twist on the Status Games platform. The only title with no phrase table in its program ROM — tokens reconstructed from their own question contexts.
How was it stored?
1984
Sex Triv 955 Q&A ▶
Status Game Corporation · Status Games. Adult trivia with per-game token table. Partially decoded — some character encoding issues remain.
How was it stored?
Erotic Facts 435 ▶
Ensexlopedia 272 ▶
Sexperts Only 217 ▶
Sensual Knowledge 30 ▶
1984
Trivia Quest 486 Q&A ▶
Techstar / Sunn Electronics · One of the earliest English electronic trivia cabinets. 6809 CPU + dual AY-3-8910, question daughterboard. Plaintext ASCII with a 21-byte pointer-table header per question — no encryption at all, rare for the era.
How was it stored?
Sports 285 ▶
Trivia 201 ▶
1985
Trivial Pursuit — All Star Sports 897 Q&A ▶
Bally Sente · Bally Sente. Rearranged ROM chips, different pointer table.
How was it stored?
1985
Progressive Music Trivia 851 Q&A ▶
Enerdyne Technologies · Same ettrivia hardware as Super Trivia Master, earlier shipment, music-heavy category mix. Extractor shares the Z80 phrase-table decoder we built for strvmstr.
How was it stored?
Movies & TV (lo) 303 ▶
Soap Operas 161 ▶
Sports 3 92 ▶
Entertainment 3 83 ▶
Wars 74 ▶
Science Fiction 73 ▶
Life Sciences 65 ▶
1985
Tic Tac Trivia 3,788 Q&A ▶
Merit Industries · Trivia on a tic-tac-toe grid — three correct in a row wins the round. Same hardware as Trivia Whiz, different record layout.
Around the World 885 ▶
Sports 780 ▶
TV / Movies / Music 751 ▶
Trivia Twist 728 ▶
Sex 644 ▶
1985
Trivia Whiz (Edition 1) 3,374 Q&A ▶
Merit Industries · The original 6221-00 board. Same 189-entry dictionary as Ed 3, but question ROMs are burned in bitswapped low-nibble order and records use `^` as an inline correct-answer marker instead of `?` terminators.
How was it stored?
Sports 1,531 ▶
Entertainment 1,032 ▶
General Interest 811 ▶
1985
Trivia Whiz (Edition 3) 3,050 Q&A ▶
Merit Industries · Merit Industries 6221 Z80 board. 189-entry bigram dictionary tokenized in program ROM. Five editions shipped in a single year.
How was it stored?
Entertainment 951 ▶
General Interest 729 ▶
Sex 698 ▶
Sports 672 ▶
1985
Triv Five (Special Edition) 1,037 Q&A ▶
Status Game Corporation · Special-edition reshuffle of the Triv Four question banks with a new program ROM. Inherits the same 8-chip category layout: Sports, General Knowledge, Entertainment, Pros Only.
How was it stored?
Sports 335 ▶
Entertainment 299 ▶
Pros Only 256 ▶
General Knowledge 147 ▶
1985
Triv III 1,176 Q&A ▶
Status Game Corporation · Sibling release between Triv Two and Triv Four. Same Intel 8085 board as the rest of the statriv2 line; only the program EPROM and the 8 question ROMs (b.u1–b.u8) changed.
How was it stored?
1985
Trivia Madness 3,792 Q&A ▶
Thunderhead / M. Kramer Manufacturing · Bar-top countertop trivia with swappable chips. Two coexisting chip formats on one board: True/False for sex/soaps/rebel/star-trek categories, and a Multiple-Choice format (with an embedded 0xC0-0xFE token dictionary per chip) for entertainment/sports/TV/travel. Same manufacturer as the near-mythical LA Beer Trivia Challenge. Long believed undumped until a 2021 dump surfaced on the Internet Archive.
How was it stored?
Rebel 707 ▶
Star Trek 605 ▶
Travel 478 ▶
Soaps 407 ▶
Sex 405 ▶
Entertainment 400 ▶
Sports 400 ▶
TV 390 ▶
1986
Name That Tune 2,614 Q&A ▶
Bally Sente · 1,003 polyphonic melodies on 6× CEM3394 analog synth chips. 16 stream opcodes, 6-voice arrangements, shared byte-reuse between songs. Playable in-browser.
How was it stored?
1986
Super Trivia Master 759 Q&A ▶
Enerdyne Technologies / PGD Inc. · Z80 + 3× AY-3-8910 trivia cabinet. 8 × 32 KB question ROMs across 4 banks (hi/lo pairs sharing Z80 I/O space). Length-prefixed token stream with a per-chip phrase table — single-byte tokens 0x60-0xFF plus 2-byte tokens 0x01-0x17 form an LZ-style dictionary. ~745 clean records extracted; cross-bank token references remain unresolved.
Rock and Pop 127 ▶
Potpourri II 118 ▶
Movies & TV 117 ▶
Sports 98 ▶
Entertainment 84 ▶
Cars, Boats and Planes 78 ▶
Science Fiction 73 ▶
Sex II 64 ▶
1986
GEI Adult Sex Pack 2,226 Q&A ▶
Greyhound Electronics · T3 format. Dedicated adult content pack. An earlier revision (gt103asxa) exists with 93% shared content and 91 unique records — kept on disk for provenance but not listed separately.
How was it stored?
Adult Sex 6 544 ▶
Adult Sex 5 466 ▶
Adult Sex 3 417 ▶
Adult Sex 2 416 ▶
Adult Sex 4 383 ▶
1986
GEI Series 11b — Adult Sex 3 2,226 Q&A ▶
Greyhound Electronics · Series 11 release with an Adult Sex 3 chip swapped in. Also ships Aerospace, Cars & Women, Rich & Famous, TV & Music.
How was it stored?
TV - Music 465 ▶
Cars - Women 463 ▶
Aerospace 443 ▶
Rich - Famous 438 ▶
Adult Sex 3 417 ▶
1986
GEI Trivia Series 13 lost
Greyhound Electronics · Never existed. GEI skipped from 12 to 14 — no ROM dump has surfaced in 40 years of arcade preservation. MAME's driver notes: "no known documented Series 13 questions set."
1986
GEI Series 12a — NFL Football 2,263 Q&A ▶
Greyhound Electronics · Series 12 variant with the only NFL Football trivia chip GEI ever shipped. Also: Adult Sex 4, Famous Quotes, New Science 2, Vices.
How was it stored?
New Science 2 566 ▶
NFL Football 471 ▶
Vices 416 ▶
Adult Sex 4 408 ▶
Famous Quotes 402 ▶
1986
GEI Series 14a — Adult Sex 5 2,360 Q&A ▶
Greyhound Electronics · Series 14 alternate with Adult Sex 5 in place of War & Peace. Shares Horrors, The Sixties, TV Comedies, Famous Couples with the parent set.
How was it stored?
The Sixties 521 ▶
Adult Sex 5 482 ▶
TV Comedies 470 ▶
Famous Couples 463 ▶
Horrors 424 ▶
1986
Deluxe Trivia 5 3,401 Q&A ▶
Merit Industries · Late-era Merit trivia. Deluxe edition with extended features. Additional encoding layer beyond the Trivia Whiz base.
Series Eight 771 ▶
Series Five 709 ▶
Series Seven 706 ▶
Series Six 634 ▶
Sex Five 581 ▶
1986
Trivia Whiz (Edition 4) 2,188 Q&A ▶
Merit Industries · Fourth edition of the Trivia Whiz series. Added Strange-But-True and Rock & Pop chips. Same 189-entry bigram dictionary as the other 6221 games with init_key<5>.
How was it stored?
Entertainment 805 ▶
Rock & Pop 710 ▶
Sports 673 ▶
1986
MTV Rock-N-Roll Trivia Part 2 3,284 Q&A ▶
Triumph Software · MTV-licensed trivia on a Pac-Man conversion kit. Four category chips (Heavy Metal, General Rock, Classic Rock, Rock Videos). Z80 bank-select at $5FF0 reads a 32KB question window into $8000-$FFFF; question text compressed via a 103-entry phrase-token dictionary baked into the program ROM.
How was it stored?
General Rock 907 ▶
Heavy Metal 893 ▶
Classic Rock 823 ▶
Rock Videos 661 ▶
1988
New Super Triv III 899 Q&A ▶
Status Game Corporation · Revised question pack for the Super Triv III cabinet. Same program ROMs, fresh trivia content.
How was it stored?
1988
Super Triv III 3,457 Q&A ▶
Status Game Corporation · Peak-80s pop culture trivia — Miami Vice, Top Gun, Back to the Future. ROMREGION_INVERT bit-flipped ROMs on top of the standard statriv2 encoding.
How was it stored?

Write-ups

The Funny Bits: What Falls Out When You Finally Read 120,000+ Trivia Questions This whole project is built on a stack of cracked 1980s arcade ROMs and an honest fact: nobody had the time to read all 120,000+ questions before. Now they've been read, and the funny bits, the typos, the sex jokes, the wrong answers, the editorial drift, finally have a witness.
Who Stole From Whom: 1,400+ Plagiarism Hits Across 9 Cabinet Manufacturers After cracking 120,000+ trivia questions out of 1980s arcade ROMs, we ran a cross-cabinet similarity scan. The results read like a courtroom. Exidy and GEI share 227 verbatim questions. Bally Sente, who licensed Trivial Pursuit from Horn Abbot, shares 201 questions with GEI, questions GEI did not license. Status Games turns up everywhere. The bar-trivia industry was running on stolen content.
1983 Cracking Exidy Fax (1983) How we decoded 3,584 trivia questions from a binary tree compressed into 22 ROM chips
1984 Cracking Trivia Quest (1984) Techstar / Sunn's Trivia Quest, one of the earliest English electronic trivia cabinets, stored every question and answer as plaintext ASCII behind a 21-byte pointer-table header. No encryption, no scramble. 486 questions recovered across Trivia and Sports.
1984 Cracking Status Games Hangman (1984) The only Status Games title with no phrase table in the ROM, tokens inferred from their own question contexts. 894 questions recovered.
1984 Cracking Bally Sente Trivial Pursuit How we decoded base-40 radix encoding to extract 3,489 Trivial Pursuit questions from 1984 arcade ROMs
1984 Cracking GEI Greyhound Electronics (1984) Plaintext ASCII, mob connections, and an unsolved compression, 6,048 questions from the original bar trivia machine
1984 Cracking Status Games Trivia (1984) OR 0x40 character encoding, bit-6 word boundaries, and compressed phrase tokens, 18,545 questions from the statriv2 family
1985 Cracking Progressive Music Trivia (1985) Enerdyne's music-heavy predecessor to Super Trivia Master, same ettrivia hardware, same LZ-style phrase table, different category mix. 852 questions recovered across 7 chip pairs, lead-loaded with Movies & TV and Soap Operas.
1985 Cracking Merit Trivia Whiz (1985-87) How we broke every Merit 6221 trivia game, Trivia Whiz Eds. 1-5 and Tic Tac Trivia, by decoding a 189-entry bigram dictionary, the address-scramble permutation, and a second bitswap LUT hidden in the Z80 program ROM. 16,000 questions recovered.
1985 Cracking Trivia Madness (1985) M. Kramer Manufacturing's bar-top trivia with two chip formats on one board. Long listed as undumped; turned up on archive.org in 2021. 3,790 questions across 8 category chips. The True/False chips' phrase dictionary hid inside a graphics ROM.
1985 Cracking GEI T3 Compression (1986) Reverse-engineering a Z80 bit-packing scheme to unlock 50,816 questions from GEI Series 8-18 and the gt103 variant pack
1985 Cracking Trivial Pursuit All Star Sports (1985) Rearranged ROM chips, a different pointer table, and 897 sports questions from a Bally Sente variant
1986 Cracking MTV Rock-N-Roll Trivia Part 2 (1986) A Pac-Man conversion kit that turned bar-top cabinets into MTV-licensed rock trivia. 3,283 questions across Heavy Metal, General Rock, Classic Rock, and Rock Videos, compressed with a 103-entry phrase-token dictionary baked into the program ROM.
1986 Cracking Super Trivia Master (1986) Enerdyne's Super Trivia Master hid its questions in an LZ-style self-referential phrase table spread across eight banks, read through a single I/O port. Token decoder reverse-engineered from the Z80 firmware; 745 questions recovered.
1986 Cracking Bally Sente Name That Tune (1986) How we decoded 1,003 polyphonic melodies, 6-voice arrangements, and drum patches from a 1986 arcade cabinet built around six CEM3394 analog synth chips