SN Systems

From Sega Retro


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SN Systems is a British company founded in 1988, in Bristol, by Andy Beveridge and Martin Day. They started their career as video game developmers in a British company know as The Assembly Line (TAL) and were involved in writing games for the Commodore 64, Atari ST and Amiga computers. The founders were disappointed at the development tools available at the time, so they developed a fast and more powerful system, the SNasm (stands for Spino Norman's Assembler[1]), initially made for Atari ST and Amiga) which was licensed[2] 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, Super NES 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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