SN Systems

From Sega Retro


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SN Systems[1] is a British company founded in 1988, in Bristol, by Andy Beveridge and Martin Day. The company started as a video game development company and was involved in writing games for Atari ST and Amiga computers. The founders were disappointed at the development tools available at the time, so they developed a fast and more powerfull system, the SNasm (stands for SN Assembler, initially made for Atari ST and Amiga) which was licensed to Ian Oliver's Cross Products ( as SNasm required some modification for use with the Mega Drive, such as the addition of interface hardware and support for the Zilog Z80 processor, Ian Oliver hand-made the RAM board himself, adding these features and creating a new product, the SNASM68K, while developing M1 Abrams Battle Tank).

In 1993 the company launched, in a joint with Psygnosis, the PSY-Q Development System line of products for various platforms, including the Sega Mega Drive, Sega 32X, Sega Mega CD, Sega Saturn, SNES and PlayStation. This second generation product included C source level stepping and breakpointing and was even faster than the original SNasm. SN Systems was acquired by Sony in 2005, to provide tools for the PlayStation 3, and future consoles but his association with the Playstation line of consoles can be traced back to 1993 when Psygnosis, at the time publishing SN Systems tools, was acquired by Sony Interactive Entertainment Inc.

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