This is in regards to the Pain Before Pleasure mystery in the 1991 arcade game Total Carnage. You'll probably want to read that page for some background.

In any case, my thoughts are that if there is a secret ending, it's almost guaranteed that the text is going to be stored in the same place as the other endings. So I went searching in the ROM for the text. Guess what, it's surprisingly hard. The reason is because the text is interlaced in two different ROMs!

In the ROM tcu89.bin, at offset 0xA431, one can find the ASCII string "ogauain!". This seems to be gibberish until you look at exactly the same offset in the ROM tcu105.bin, where you can see the string "Cnrtltos".

Interlace the two and you get the message "Congratulations!" Using this, one can reconstruct the entire section of text as follows. The line breaks are actually ASCII 0 (NULL) in the ROM:

Congratulations!

You have joined the heroes
from Smash T.V. in the
Pleasure Domes! We have
been waiting for you! The
ladies have been most anxious!

You have delivered Captain
Carnage and Major Mayhem into
a life of leisure. Their every
wish will be granted. Of
course, they will have to share
the goodies with the Smash boys,
but there is plenty to go around!

You are one of only a few
who have reached this far.

You are a great dual joystick
game player.


However, as greedy as you are, you
failed to pick up all the cash and
prizes sitting in the Pleasure Dome!

If you do this, the ladies will
prove that pain before pleasure
is worth it.

Can you do this?


Thank you for playing
Total Carnage.


Total Carnage Design Team:
Mark Turmell
John Tobias
Shawn Liptak
Jim Gentile
Jon Hey
Eugene Jarvis
Tony Goskie

Special Thanks:
George Petro
Larry Demar
Ed Boon (Voices)
Todd Allen
Cary Mednick
Sheridan Oursler
Mark Loffredo
Ray Gay
Ray Czajka
Betty Purcell



Congratulations!

You have destroyed Akhboob's
army and his ability to
create more mutant life
forms. You wrecked his
Bio-Nuclear facility,
airport, communications
system, weapons arsenal,
and his military vehicles.

You also saved hundreds
of hostages and recovered
billions of dollars worth
of stolen gems.
That is great news!

However, you allowed General
Akhboob to escape!

Being the DUFUS you are, you
*also failed to collect the 220
**also failed to collect the 200
keys required to join other
game heroes in the Midway
Pleasure Domes.
This is not good.

Ahkboob lives...

No pleasure for you today...

Thank you for playing!


Congratulations!

You fried the hell out of
that jerk! Great job!

You have destroyed Akhboob's
army and his ability to
create more mutant life
forms. You blew up his
Bio-Nuclear facility,
airport, communications,
and weapons arsenal. You
saved hundreds of lives!
You are a stud game player.

However, the real goal of
this game is to join the
heroes from Smash T.V. in
the Midway Pleasure Domes.
*You must collect 220 keys
**You must collect 200 keys
to gain entrance.
You failed to do this.

You suck.

Thank you for playing!

There are a few non-ASCII characters in there, which I've used asterisks to represent. * is 0x80, and ** is 0x81. It's clearly a branch point.

The word "Congratulations" (interlaced), appears nowhere else in the ROMs.

Now, is this incontrovertible evidence that there is no special "pain before pleasure" ending? Not at all. It's certainly conceivable that the programmers decided to use a special encoding that they used only for the hidden ending, and whatever strings are shown are stored in some obscure location in the ROMs. However, I strongly doubt it; at this point it just seems more likely that this was a practical joke on the part of the programmers, especially as seeing nobody has ever achieved this in the last 15 years.

Don't lose any more sleep over it.