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.

April 24, 2026 · crack, enerdyne, promutrv, z80

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Progressive Music Trivia

Enerdyne Technologies · 1985 · ettrivia board · Z80 @ 4 MHz · 852 records across 7 chip pairs

The Cabinet

Progressive Music Trivia¹ is Enerdyne Technologies’ 1985 shipment. one year before Super Trivia Master , on the same board, aimed at bars that wanted a more music-and-entertainment slant than the general-knowledge cabinets from GEI and Status Games. The ROM board is labeled promutrv in MAME’s ettrivia driver, which handles both it and strvmstr (the hardware is identical, Z80 @ 4 MHz, three AY-3-8910 sound chips, four banks of paired hi/lo-byte question ROMs reached through a single I/O port).

This cabinet surfaced on a third-pass archive.org hunt for undumped trivia hardware, a fresh dump that MAME accepts straight into the existing ettrivia machine. Everything the decoder learned cracking Super Trivia Master applied here on the first pass.

The chip pairing for promutrv:

The Data

All 852 records browse at /browse?source=enerdyne_promutrv . seven chips’ worth, lead-loaded with Movies & TV and Soap Operas. Decoder shared with Super Trivia Master .

How We Cracked It

The Decoder Was Already Built

The whole promutrv crack was shipping the existing Super Trivia Master decoder at a new ROM directory. One Python change: the strvmstr.py extractor grew a ROMSETS dict that maps "strvmstr" and "promutrv" to their respective bank layouts and chip-label metadata. The decoder itself, the 12-byte chip header, the LZ-style phrase expansion, the per-chip category attribution, is unchanged.

ROMSETS = {
    "strvmstr": {
        "banks": [("sex2.lo0",      "sports.hi0",  0),
                  ("movies.lo1",    "rock-pop.hi1", 1),
                  ("sci-fi.lo2",    "cars.hi2",    2),
                  ("potprri.lo3",   "entrtn.hi3",  3)],
        "meta": { ... },
    },
    "promutrv": {
        "banks": [("movie-tv.lo0",  "movie-tv.hi0", 0),
                  ("scifi.lo1",     "enter3.hi1",   1),
                  ("sports3.lo2",   "life-sci.hi2", 2),
                  ("wars.lo3",      "soaps.hi3",    3)],
        "meta": { ... },
    },
}

The phrase-table / expansion details, how the 12-byte header points at the dictionary, the LZ-style back-references, the special terminator bytes, are all documented in the Super Trivia Master post . If you want the crack story, start there.

Yield

movie-tv.lo0  303    sports3.lo2   92    wars.lo3     74
movie-tv.hi0    0    life-sci.hi2  65    soaps.hi3   161
scifi.lo1      73    enter3.hi1    84

total: 852 records

The movie-tv.hi0 Quirk

The hi-byte chip of the Movies & TV pair returned zero records. This is almost certainly a header quirk, both chips in the pair carry the same category name, which confuses the 12-byte-header parser into treating the second chip as a continuation of the first. The other 3 bank pairs have distinct names on each side (scifi + enter3, sports3 + life-sci, wars + soaps) and extract cleanly.

The practical loss is modest: the lo-byte already produced 303 records, the biggest single chip in the set. Whatever’s on movie-tv.hi0 is a second batch of Movies & TV questions we haven’t reached, maybe another 200-300 records. Flagged for a future pass that special-cases the duplicate-name pairing.

What It Tells Us

Cracking Progressive Music Trivia was a 20-minute job, not because the crack was easy, but because the crack already happened a year ago on Super Trivia Master. Every new ROM set Enerdyne shipped on the ettrivia board is a re-skin of the same questions-in-a-phrase-table format, and once the decoder exists, every new cabinet is mostly a metadata update.

This is the payoff for doing the hard decompression work once. Enerdyne shipped at least two cabinets on this board; if a third surfaces, it’ll drop in the same way.

References

Related

More cracks

• Super Trivia Master (Enerdyne 1986)

Cross-archive analyses

• Who Stole From Whom: 1,349 plagiarism hits
• The Funny Bits: AI reads 115K trivia questions