History

The story of this website started back in early 1999, when Cyan was invited to
join an unusual start-up group of coders and hackers, known as the
"Sonic Stuff Research Group" (SSRG). Although it was this which eventually
led to the website, and tools such as the Maze Editor, this was by no means
the whole story.

Cyan's ROM hacking adventures can be traced back to 1997, when Megadrive
emulators were just beginning to surface for the IBM-PC microcomputer. Being
a computer programmer and long-time user of 68000-based machines, Cyan experimented
with hacking and adjusting the ROMs in various ways, although typically without results.

It wasn't until Cyan found a magazine with an action replay code to access the
leftovers of Hidden Palace Zone in Sonic 2 that things really started to progress.
By carefully hacking savestate files, Cyan was able to access Hidden Palace Zone
under emulation.

Sadly, almost all of the data relating to Hidden Palace Zone had been removed from
the ROM prior to release, so the corrupted zone remained little more than a curiosity.