Cracking Trivial Pursuit All Star Sports (1985)

Rearranged ROM chips, a different pointer table, and 897 sports questions from a Bally Sente variant

April 10, 2026 · crack, bally-sente, trivial-pursuit, 6809

Trivial Pursuit All Star Sports

Bally Sente · 1985 · SAC-1 board · Motorola 6809 · 897 sports records

The Game

By March 1985, Bally Sente had already shipped four Trivial Pursuit editions on the SAC-1 board (Genus I, Genus II, Baby Boomer, Young Players) and the format was a hit, the cocktail-cabinet with four colored category buttons was in bars across America. The All Star Sports edition was the last one out the door that spring and the only one targeted at a specific demographic: every category, every question, every answer was about sports.

This was the era when sports bar culture had just fused with coin-op, you’d sit down at the Trivial Pursuit table between innings of the Sox game, while the jukebox played Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A., and try to remember who won the 1962 World Series. All Star Sports was designed to be the machine for that bar: if you walked up and saw its category wheel, it wasn’t going to ask you about Shakespeare. Bally Sente partnered with Horn Abbot on a sports-only question pack, 900-ish questions covering baseball, football, basketball, hockey, golf, Olympics, and “general sports”, and shipped it in a new cabinet variant aimed squarely at the tavern circuit.

The Data

All 897 sports records browse at /browse?source=bally_triviasp . heavy on boxing, horse racing, hockey, and Olympic trivia. West Germany still exists. The Soviet Union competes. Muhammad Ali is still boxing.

How We Cracked It

The Question

Every other Trivial Pursuit edition we’d cracked, Genus I, Genus II, Baby Boomer, Young Players, shared a clean ROM layout : AB chips hold base-40 encoded text, CD chips hold pointer tables, and one extractor runs the lot. Same base-40 alphabet. Same 6809 CPU. Same hardware as the SAC-1 board.

The All Star Sports edition breaks the pattern.

What Changed

Same base-40 encoding. Same 6809 CPU. Same hardware. But the ROM chips are reorganized:

Text data: allsport.8a through allsport.5a, four 16KB chips mapped at $0000, $4000, $8000, $C000. The other editions use ab01.bin through ab67.bin.
Pointer table: allsport.3a, a single 16KB chip holding both the question table (at offset $0000) and the answer table (at offset $2000). The other editions use a separate CD ROM pair.
Prefix phrases: Stored at $C000+ in the text data (in allsport.5a), not at the start. Fifteen phrases: “What”, “What is the”, “What are”, “Where”, “Who”, “Who is the”, “How many”, “When”, “Which”, etc.

The Pointer Table

Question entries are 3 bytes each, starting at allsport.3a[0x0000]:

  [prefix_byte] [ptr_hi] [ptr_lo]

The prefix_byte is a direct offset into the text data where the prefix phrase lives. The pointer is big-endian, pointing to the question fragment in the text data. Concatenate prefix + fragment + “?” for the full question.

897 entries, then zeros until 0x2000 where the answer table begins:

  [correct_hi] [correct_lo] [wrong1_hi] [wrong1_lo] [wrong2_hi] [wrong2_lo] [wrong3_hi] [wrong3_lo]

Four big-endian pointers per question, 8 bytes each, 897 entries. Same structure as the other editions, just in a different chip.

The Heuristic Trap

Our first extraction attempt used a generic heuristic extractor, scan for printable ASCII runs, group them into question/answer clusters. It produced 680 “questions” that were almost entirely garbage: truncated text, answers from the wrong questions, hex noise from misinterpreted base-40 data. The heuristic approach fails when questions and answers aren’t stored sequentially.

The fix was straightforward once we mapped the correct chip ordering from the MAME driver XML (u8a=$0000, u7a=$4000, u6a=$8000, u5a=$C000) and found the answer table at the expected offset in the pointer chip.

Results

897 questions, all sports, from the mid-1980s knowledge base:

  What sport did Major Walter Clopton Wingfield invent?
    ✓ Tennis  ✗ Golf / Handball / Skiing

  What country was ski ace Rosi Mittermaier from?
    ✓ West Germany  ✗ East Germany / Liechtenstein / Luxembourg

  Who is the all time leader in NASCAR victories?
    ✓ Richard Petty  ✗ Richard Getty / Jackie Stewart / Bobby Allison

  What '66 to '67 NBA team was voted history's greatest?
    ✓ The Philadelphia 76ers  ✗ The Denver Nuggets / The N.Y. Knicks / The Portland Trailblazers

  Who was the first National Leaguer to hit 500 home runs?
    ✓ Mel Ott  ✗ Bill Melton / Dick Allen / Hank Aaron

Arcade Trivia Archive, data extracted from MAME ROM dumps using a custom Python decoder. Extractor: scripts/bally_sente/extract.py

References

More cracks

Cross-archive analyses

Trivial Pursuit (All Star Sports)¹ (1984, Bally Sente / Horn Abbot Ltd.) · Arcade-Museum · Flyer · MAME romset: triviasp ↩︎