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.

April 19, 2026 · crack, status-games, statriv2, hangman, 8085

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Hangman

Status Game Corporation · 1984 · Intel 8085 @ 12.4 MHz · same statriv2 board · 893 records

The Game

Hangman1 (Status Game Corporation, 1984) took the bar-trivia formula and bolted it onto the old paper-and-pencil guessing game. Instead of four answer buttons to a multiple-choice prompt, the screen showed a category, a row of underscores, and a doomed stick figure. Players guessed letters; wrong ones added a limb. Get the phrase before the figure swings, keep your quarter.

It shipped into the same NYC-area bars as Status Games’ other 1984 cabinets, Triv Quiz and Status Trivia 2, on the same Intel 8085 board at 12.4 MHz. Status Games reused everything: hardware, monitor, coin door, answer buttons, boot sequence. The only things that changed per title were the program EPROM and the question ROMs.

Which is why Hangman looked like a trivially easy target. Same hardware, same MAME driver (statriv2), same OR 0x40 encoding, same phrase-token compression as the other seven Status Games titles. Open the aux ROMs, decode with the same pipeline, done.

Except it wasn’t.

The Data

All 893 records browse at /browse?source=statriv2_hangman . full token coverage, one source-corrupt record left over (real ROM damage, not extraction).

How We Cracked It

The Phrase Table That Wasn’t There

Every other Status Games title stores its phrase table as plain ASCII in the program ROM, a run of 0xFF-separated English strings like WHAT IS THE , WHO PLAYED , IN WHAT MOVIE , plus a little pointer table the 8085 uses to look up a phrase for each token byte.

Hangman’s program ROM has nothing. No run of ASCII phrases. Not encoded, not ciphered, just absent. The main_hang_*.u36/u7/u8/u9 files contain the 8085 game loop, the wheel-value tables for the letter guess scoring, and the stick-figure bitmap, but no phrase dictionary.

Meanwhile the question ROMs (aux_2764.1 through aux_2764.7) were full of token bytes in the 0x80-0xD4 range, waiting to be expanded.

Where The Questions Came From

Our first pass guessed the missing phrases from context: pull every question that uses a token, read them side by side, pick the phrase that fits. It got a lot of them wrong. Two of the chips came out almost entirely scrambled (“who is carmine’s did on laverne & shirley”).

The real answer is in the program. Hangman never reads those trivia chips through a phrase table at all. The only question chip its code touches is aux_27c256.8, which holds the hangman puzzles themselves (“A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS”…). The seven aux_2764 chips are leftovers, question ROMs pulled from other Status games and dropped onto the board:

  aux_2764.1, .2   Sex Triv        (byte-identical to sex2.bin, sex7.bin)
  aux_2764.3, .5   Triv Quiz       (records identical to qmt12, qmt11)
  aux_2764.4       Super Triv II   (its sports tokens match 1:1)
  aux_2764.6, .7   Triv Two        (byte-identical to statuspb.u3, .u4)

So each chip gets decoded with its own game’s phrase table, read straight from that game’s program ROM. No guessing left:

  who is carmine's did on "laverne & shirley"
    → what was carmine's nickname on "laverne & shirley"   (big ragu)
  who is warned against "greasy kids stuff"
    → what product warned against "greasy kids stuff"      (vitalis)

The “sports bank” tokens up at 0xC0-0xD4 are just Super Triv II’s table, which runs higher than the others.

The Holdouts

The Obed Ariri question shows up twice on the Super Triv II chip, and both copies are damaged in the ROM itself. The worse one (“he hit 4 hoege football…”) is left out. The other still reads:

  what fiege football career record does obed ariri hold
    → Field goals   (Touchdowns / Interceptions)

That’s “What football career record does Obed Ariri hold?”, and Ariri did hold the NCAA career field-goal record at Clemson. The typos (hoege, fiege) are baked into the chip.

The Duplication Trick

Final wrinkle: some records would extract eight times. The Super Triv II chip (aux_2764.4) holds just 21 questions repeated eight times over. Not a parsing bug, it’s how the chip was filled.

Fix is trivial, dedupe on (question, answer) at write-time. Fix is only trivial if you know that’s what you’re looking at, which took a minute of hex diffing across the ROMs to confirm.

Result

893 unique questions, full token coverage, one source-corrupt record left over (real ROM damage, not extraction). The same cracking pipeline as the rest of the Status Games line , but none of the phrase data was in the place the pipeline expected.

Hangman’s questions were never really Hangman’s. They were four other games’ questions, and each one needed its own game’s table.

References

More cracks

Cross-archive analyses

  1. Hangman (1984, Status Game Corporation) · Arcade-Museum · Flyer · MAME romset: hangman ↩︎