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.

133,200 questions
58 games cracked
16 write-ups
The ’80s give or take

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 3,616 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 ▶
Potpourri 904 ▶
Movies and TV 903 ▶
Sports 899 ▶
1984
GEI Trivia Series 7 872 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 201 ▶
TV Dallas 190 ▶
Sex Triv 162 ▶
Kids Korner 161 ▶
Good Guys 158 ▶
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 957 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?
Ensexlopedia 327 ▶
Sensual Knowledge 321 ▶
Erotic Facts 309 ▶
1984
Trivia Quest 489 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 288 ▶
Trivia 201 ▶
1985
Progressive Music Trivia 4,199 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?
Life Sciences 777 ▶
Science Fiction 626 ▶
Soap Operas 611 ▶
Sports 3 584 ▶
Entertainment 3 565 ▶
Movies & TV (Lo) 531 ▶
Wars 505 ▶
1985
Tic Tac Trivia 5,600 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.
Trivia Twist 1,190 ▶
Sports 1,125 ▶
Sex 1,119 ▶
TV / Movies / Music 1,102 ▶
Around the World 1,064 ▶
1985
Trivia Whiz (Edition 1) 3,811 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 1,707 ▶
Entertainment 1,214 ▶
General Interest 890 ▶
1985
Triv III 1,226 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 6,910 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 992 ▶
Entertainment 979 ▶
Travel 972 ▶
Sports 925 ▶
TV 916 ▶
Star Trek 796 ▶
Soaps 676 ▶
Sex 654 ▶
1986
Name That Tune 2,656 Q&A ▶
Bally Sente · 1,007 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 4,447 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.
Sports 702 ▶
Science Fiction 626 ▶
Rock and Pop 615 ▶
Entertainment 565 ▶
Movies & TV 514 ▶
Potpourri II 510 ▶
Cars, Boats and Planes 459 ▶
Sex II 456 ▶
1986
GEI Adult Sex Pack 2,255 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 5 478 ▶
Adult Sex 3 418 ▶
Adult Sex 2 414 ▶
Adult Sex 4 401 ▶
1986
GEI Series 11b — Adult Sex 3 2,230 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 464 ▶
Aerospace 443 ▶
Rich - Famous 440 ▶
Adult Sex 3 418 ▶
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 2,265 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 404 ▶
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 5,304 Q&A ▶
Merit Industries · Late-era Merit trivia. Deluxe edition with extended features. Additional encoding layer beyond the Trivia Whiz base.
Series Eight 1,097 ▶
Series Six 1,088 ▶
Series Seven 1,067 ▶
Series Five 1,060 ▶
Sex Five 992 ▶
1986
Trivia Whiz (Edition 4) 4,419 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?
Sports 1,133 ▶
Entertainment 1,119 ▶
Rock & Pop 1,103 ▶
Strange But True 1,064 ▶
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 ▶

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: 2,100+ Plagiarism Hits Across 9 Cabinet Manufacturers After cracking 145,000+ trivia questions out of 1980s arcade ROMs, we ran a cross-cabinet similarity scan. The results read like a courtroom. Exidy and GEI share 228 verbatim questions. Bally Sente, who licensed Trivial Pursuit from Horn Abbot, shares 187 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 3,587 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. 489 questions recovered across Trivia and Sports.
1984 Cracking Status Games Hangman (1984) The only Status Games title with no phrase table in the ROM, because its trivia chips were leftovers from four other Status games. 893 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, 4,884 questions from the original bar trivia machine
1984 Cracking Status Games Trivia (1984) Add-0x20 character encoding, bit-6 word boundaries, and compressed phrase tokens, 18,801 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. 4199 questions recovered across 7 chips, 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. 34,700 questions recovered.
1985 Cracking Trivia Madness (1985) M. Kramer Manufacturing's bar-top trivia with two question formats on one board. Long listed as undumped; turned up on archive.org in 2021. 6,910 questions across 8 categories. The board-wide phrase dictionary hid inside a graphics ROM.
1985 Cracking GEI T3 Compression (1986) Reverse-engineering a Z80 bit-packing scheme to unlock 29,211 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. 3,284 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; 4447 questions recovered.
1986 Cracking Bally Sente Name That Tune (1986) How we decoded 1,007 polyphonic melodies, 6-voice arrangements, and drum patches from a 1986 arcade cabinet built around six CEM3394 analog synth chips