Sonic Crackers/Hidden content

Sonic Studium?

For the longest time, people have opened up the Crackers ROM in a hex editor and noticed one small detail: The ROM header says "Sonic Studium," compared to "Sonic Crackers," as the title screen of the game says. Which name is "correct" is yet to be identified; however, what does "Studium" mean? Is it a typo? Is it nonsensical? Is it a joke?

SpinelSun pointed out on the forums that this was most likely a mere translation error. A common way things are mistranslated to and from Japanese is to use a romanization table letter-per-letter, which doesn't conform exactly to English or Japanese. Japanese has syllables with vowels after every consonant (barring a single letter 'n'). As such...

Stadium would become スタジアム, literally "Sutajiamu" (Japanese has no 'di' syllable; 'ji' is in its place). This is where the error occurs: in Japanese, the vowel 'a' is pronounced as in the English word "father". As such, the スタジ would sound very much like the English word "stud".

Thus, the name is in fact Sonic Stadium. "Studium" is a mere translation error by someone who does not understand both English and Japanese well enough to ascertain the original word. Other examples include Amy (エミー) being referred to as "Emy" in the Sonic CD PC OMAKE directory.

Interestingly, the translator knew to convert the 'ji' back to 'd' at least. The error would have been more apparent if the header said "Sonic Stujium". He/She most likely looked up both "stujium" and "studium" in a dictionary, where he/she would have learned that "studium" is in fact a word in Latin, meaning "zeal".