"Knuckles Ring Star" -> "Star Ring Knuckles" -> "Starring Knuckles" Maybe it's just me, but I seem to be noticing a lot of absurd things like this :P
After seeing the Sonic Crackers title screen and ROM title, I wouldn't be surprised if that was the original reasoning behind it.
Wow, that's the stupidest thing I saw in a game. I don't say you're wrong, but that the developers... Well... Somebody was bored or something :P By the way, about the fact that third party games are in a SoA archive, here goes an aclaration: all games had to be sent to Sega in order to approval. This was required for the game to be released. Sega not only made sure the game was good enough and followed their standards, but also they made sure the game didn't try anything stupid internally. This is specially true for the Sega CD, where messing with the wrong IRQs is likely to cause the BIOS go gay and hence the CD drive to jam up. If a game did something that can be potentially dangerous for the hardware, the game didn't recieve approval. So watch out. Also games using hardware debug stuff (like using the LEDs from the Sega CD or the refresh signal from the Mega Drive used for the DRAM devcarts) didn't recieve approval. Does that make things clear?
Don't forget things like "Sonic Studium" and other dumb puns they usually stuck into the ROM header during development. It wouldn't suprise me if it was mostly just an internal joke.
It's yet doubtful if Sonic Studium was just a mistake. Nothing beats that joke :P I love when you put jokes inside a program and then your boss comes and takes it for release to some magazine or something like that without giving you time to remove the joke. Then is when the joke becomes even more ridiculous XD
I don't follow the technical stuff much, but I think the ROM header for Sonic Crackers reads as "Sonic Studium", while the title screen reads "Sonic Crackers".
Some games had really stupid stuff in the header in their prototype states. Can't remember any off hand but I'm sure there's a famous one witha fighting game or something...
Crazy japs and their engrish. Those kind of things can mean anything or nothing at all. But personally, the most exciting thing about those protos is the chaotix part, I wonder if we can see exactly when the map thing seen in crackers was dropped. Because that rendering on the jap manual and this new title screen could surely work as a species of map like crackers, substituting the level select thingy. And major kudos to drx, of course!
It IS a mistake. Studium is a very common misspelling of Stadium among japanese. It has to do with how Stadium is pronounced/spelled in japanese, ????? the "stad-" ends up sounding like the english word "stud" . To confuse things, Studium is a real word, old word for university, means place of study or some shit. (latin?) Another common mispelling that comes to mind is Yummy (???) being spelled Yammy. There is even a couple japanese brand names that use the incorrect spelling Yammy in their logos... :P
Nice to see some technical reasoning behind it. Another example of this is the DAC "Lets Go" sample, also in Crackers. It sounds like "Retsu Go", again due to Kanji/pronunciation issues.
