Cracking Status Games Trivia (1984)

OR 0x40 character encoding, bit-6 word boundaries, and compressed phrase tokens, 18,545 questions from the statriv2 family

April 2, 2026 · crack, status-games, statriv2, 8085

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Status Games Triv (Quiz / Two / Four / Sex / Super Triv II-III)

Status Game Corporation · 1984-1988 · Intel 8085 @ 12.4 MHz · 10 ROM sets · 18,545 records

The Games

Status Game Corporation was a small Brooklyn-based coin-op operator that spent the mid-1980s shipping bar-trivia cabinets into the same NYC-area taverns and diners as its bigger competitors. Their machines were the kind of thing you’d glance at near the cigarette vending machine, a simple upright or cocktail cabinet, color monitor, four chunky answer buttons, and a coin slot ready for quarters. Players got a handful of questions per credit, cycling through trivia categories, chasing a score posted on the attract loop.

The lineup spanned enough gameplay styles to keep an operator’s route interesting. Triv Quiz¹ (1984) was the original 4-answer multiple choice format. Triv Two (1984) and Triv Four (1985) extended it with more questions per coin. Hangman (1984) put a twist on the formula, players guessed letters to reveal an answer phrase, with each wrong letter adding to the doomed stick figure (this one got its own write-up , its program ROM had no phrase table at all). Sex Triv (1985) was the adult version for certain bars (“Ensexlopedia”, “Sensual Knowledge”, and “Sexperts Only” as categories). Super Triv II (1985) added XOR encryption, and Super Triv III (1988) bumped the question pack to include late-80s pop culture, Miami Vice, Back to the Future, Top Gun.

All of them ran on the same platform: an Intel 8085 board at 12.4 MHz that the MAME driver calls statriv2. Status Games didn’t design the hardware from scratch; they shared it across their whole trivia line and just swapped question ROMs and program EPROMs. The result is eight ROM sets that all speak the same encoded dialect.

The Data

18,545 cracked records across the ten statriv2 ROM sets covered here (Hangman’s 894 are documented separately):

Triv Quiz → · Status Trivia 2 → · Triv III → · Status Trivia 4 → · Trivia 5 SE → · Sex Trivia → · Super Triv II → · Super Triv III → · New Super Triv III → · Qua Quiz 2 →

How We Cracked It

The Question

Open any Status Games question ROM in a hex editor and you get garbage. No plaintext. No obvious ASCII. Every byte has bit 6 cleared, which destroys the distinction between uppercase letters, lowercase letters, and control codes. There are four layers to undo.

Layer 1: OR 0x40

The foundational encoding. Every character byte in the ROM has bit 6 (0x40) cleared. To recover ASCII, OR each byte with 0x40:

  ROM byte:   0x01  0x12  0x09  0x16  0x09  0x01
  OR 0x40:    0x41  0x52  0x49  0x56  0x49  0x41
  ASCII:       'A'   'R'   'I'   'V'   'I'   'A'

This is not encryption, it is a side effect of how the 8085 firmware stores characters. The letter A (0x41) becomes 0x01. The letter a (0x61) becomes 0x21. Space (0x20) stays at 0x20. The low 6 bits carry the character identity; bit 6 is repurposed as a structural flag.

Layer 2: Bit-6 Word Boundaries

Bit 6 does double duty. When a raw byte has bit 6 set (range 0x40-0x7F), it marks the last character of a word, a space should be inserted after it. The byte itself IS the ASCII code (no OR needed), and a word boundary follows.

This eliminates storing space characters between words. Consider “IN FLASH GORDON”:

  Bytes:  29 6E 26 2C 21 33 68 07 2F 32 24 2F 6E
          I  n  F  L  A  S  h  '  G  O  R  D  O  N

  0x29 = 'I'  (bit 6 clear → regular character, OR 0x40 → 0x69 → 'i')
  0x6E = 'N'  (bit 6 SET → end of word "IN", byte is 0x6E = 'n', insert space)
  0x26 = 'F'  (bit 6 clear → OR 0x40 → 0x66 → 'f')
  0x2C = 'L'  (bit 6 clear → OR 0x40 → 0x6C → 'l')
  0x21 = 'A'  (bit 6 clear → OR 0x40 → 0x61 → 'a')
  0x33 = 'S'  (bit 6 clear → OR 0x40 → 0x73 → 's')
  0x68 = 'H'  (bit 6 SET → end of word "FLASH", byte is 0x68 = 'h', insert space)
  ...
  0x6E = 'N'  (bit 6 SET → end of word "GORDON", insert space)

The result: IN FLASH GORDON stored in 13 bytes instead of 15 (no spaces). For short trivia questions this saves 10-15%, significant on 8KB EPROMs.

Layer 3: High-Bit Word Tokens (0x80+)

Bytes with bit 7 set (0x80-0xBF) are not characters at all. They are indices into a phrase table stored in the 8085 program ROM. Each game variant has its own table. For Triv Quiz, the table lives at address 0x2F0D in the program ROM:

  Token   Phrase
  ─────   ──────────────────────────────
  0x80    WHAT IS THE CAPITAL OF
  0x82    WHAT IS THE
  0x84    WHAT IS
  0x88    WHO INVENTED THE
  0x8C    WHO SAID
  0x8E    IN THE
  0x93    WHO
  0x94    THE
  0x96    WHAT
  0x97    FIRST
  0xA2    WORLD SERIES
  0xB4    WHO PLAYED
  0xBC    'GILLIGAN'S ISLAND'
  0xBF    'BEVERLY HILLBILLIES'

A single byte 0xB4 expands to WHO PLAYED , 11 characters from 1 byte. The Triv Quiz table has 64 entries (0x80-0xBF), heavily weighted toward trivia question starters and TV show titles. A question beginning with “WHO PLAYED THE LEAD IN” compresses to just three bytes: B4 94 ... plus the remaining text.

Layer 4: Field Delimiters

The delimiter bytes in the 0xF0+ range give structure to each question record:

  0xFE, question text line break (wraps to second display line)
  0xFA, answer separator (first answer is correct)
  0xFB, answer separator (variant)
  0xFC, answer separator (variant)
  0xFF, end of question record

A complete question record looks like this:

  [question text bytes...]
  FE                          ← line break (display wraps here)
  [more question text...]
  FA                          ← first answer follows (this is the correct one)
  [correct answer bytes...]
  FA                          ← second answer
  [wrong answer bytes...]
  FA                          ← third answer
  [wrong answer bytes...]
  FA                          ← fourth answer
  [wrong answer bytes...]
  FF                          ← end of record

The parser splits on 0xFF, finds the first answer delimiter (0xFA, 0xFB, or 0xFC, which one varies by ROM set), then splits answers on that same delimiter. The first answer is always correct; the game shuffles display order at runtime.

Layer 5: Super Triv II Encryption

Super Triv II (1986) adds a fifth layer: per-byte XOR encryption based on the ROM address. Each byte is first inverted and masked to 5 bits, then XORed with a bit-swapped version of the address byte:

  decrypted = (~byte) & 0x1F
  key = bitswap8(address & 0xFF, 4, 3, 3, 2, 2, 1, 1, 0)
  decrypted ^= key

The bitswap8 function reorders the 8 bits of the address low byte. bit 0 of the output comes from bit 0 of the input, bit 1 from bit 1, bit 2 from bit 1, bit 3 from bit 2, and so on. The doubled bits mean the key space is smaller than 256 values, but it is enough to defeat casual hex-editor browsing. This algorithm was confirmed against the MAME driver source for supertr2.

After decryption, the standard OR 0x40 / bit-6 / token encoding applies.

Extracting the Token Tables

Each game variant compiles its own phrase table into the 8085 program ROM. The extractor searches for the table by scanning for sequences of uppercase ASCII phrases separated by 0xFF bytes:

  def extract_token_table(program_rom: bytes) -> dict[int, str]:
      # Find longest run of 0xFF-separated uppercase phrases
      # Token 0x80 = first phrase, 0x81 = second, etc.

This works for the four sets we have, but it is a heuristic. The correct approach is full 8085 firmware disassembly to find the table pointer, the firmware loads the table base address into a register pair and indexes with the token byte minus 0x80. For undumped or variant ROM sets, the token mapping remains unsolved without that disassembly work.

Results

18,545 questions extracted across the 10 statriv2 ROM sets covered by this post (Hangman’s 894 are documented separately):

  Triv Quiz          1,392 questions   (1984)
  Triv Two           1,270 questions   (1984)
  Triv III           1,225 questions   (1985)
  Triv Four          1,038 questions   (1985, 4 category chips)
  Triv 5 SE          1,038 questions   (1985, special edition)
  Sex Triv             955 questions   (1985, offset-4 token table)
  Super Triv II      3,804 questions   (1986, XOR encrypted)
  Super Triv III     3,460 questions   (1988, ROMREGION_INVERT)
  New Super Triv III   899 questions   (1988, alt question set, 1 bad chip dropped)
  Qua Quiz 2         3,464 questions   (1985, German-language)
  ─────────────────────────────────────
  Total             18,545

Super Triv II alone, with its 8 question ROM chips and XOR encryption, is the largest single extraction in the archive. Sample questions:

  [Triv Quiz]    WHAT IS THE CAPITAL OF Montana
    ✓ Helena  ✗ Billings / Great Falls / Butte

  [Triv Two]     WHO PLAYED the scarecrow in the wizard of oz
    ✓ Ray Bolger  ✗ Bert Lahr / Jack Haley / Frank Morgan

  [Super Triv II] IN FLASH GORDON what was the name of the evil emperor
    ✓ Ming  ✗ Ling / Khan / Fang

What Remains

The token tables are the weak link. We have confirmed tables for Triv Quiz (64 phrases at 0x2F0D), but each game variant, and there are at least a dozen statriv2 ROM sets in MAME, may use a different table with different phrase assignments. Fully solving every variant requires disassembling each game’s 8085 program ROM to locate its table pointer, which is straightforward but tedious firmware archaeology.

Across the eleven Status Games sets the archive carries, after the auto-extracted tables land, exactly five distinct unknown tokens remained in the raw question streams (34 byte occurrences in 112K records). All five are now mapped:

The hangman four-token group sat above the normal 0x80-0xBF phrase range, appearing in exactly two garbled sports-bank records. Context in hangman alone was too sparse to crack, but Super Triv II uses the same 8085 board, the same phrase-token encoding, and its auto-extracted table has those exact bytes as FOOTBALL / BASEBALL / CAREER / RECORD. Borrowing the four entries turned hangman’s garbled “he hit 4 _ _ _ does obed ariri hold” into “he hit 4 football career record does Obed Ariri hold → field goals”: Ariri’s NCAA career field-goal record, 1977-1981.

Zero placeholder-bearing rows ship in the archive.

The encoding itself is elegant for 1984: three layers of compression (bit-6 boundaries, phrase tokens, field delimiters) on an 8-bit CPU with no hardware compression support. The 8085 runs at 12.4MHz, fast enough to decode tokens in real time as the player reads the question on screen.

Arcade Trivia Archive, data extracted from MAME ROM dumps using a custom Python decoder. Extractor: scripts/statriv2/extract.py · Format: scripts/statriv2/format.py

References

Related

More cracks

• Status Games Hangman

Cross-archive analyses

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