SN Systems is a company that specialised in creating development tools for game developers in the UK, it was founded in 1989 by Martin Day and Andy Beveridge 1. Martin Day has the nickname Spiny Norman which he used during the naming of their first development tool they wrote, an assembler called SNASM (Spiny Norman’s Assembler) 2.
Back in 1989 they were looking for good development tools for the Atari ST and CBM Amiga but as none met their criteria, so they decided to create their own (SNASM), and thankfully they did as without this, game development would not be the same today.
Although they never actually sold SNASM under the name SN Systems, instead fellow British-based development tool creator Cross Products would license it and contribute to its development, selling it under their name.
it later became the de facto standard for Mega Drive Game Development around the world according to the official SN Systems website (archived in 1997) 1
In an interview with ST NEWS Disk Magazine in August 1989 (preserved thanks to SegaRetro Sega Retro ) he claimed that SNASM was eight times faster than Argasm even when assembling on disk rather than directly like Argasm does 2. The interview goes on to say they will be showing it on a PC show in September 1989, not sure which PC show this was.
The game Cybercon III (1991) has The Snasm Cross Development Tools in the credits and was programmed by Andy Beveridge along with Martin Day and Adrian Stephens 3.
Cross Products then built upon the product and released their own version called SNASM2, which would later become a competitor for SN Systems next development kit known as PSY-Q. They are also a company worth learning about, we have a seperate post on their development kit products such as SNASM2:
The Sega Mega Drive version was known as SNASM65k and developed by Cross Products as part of SNASM2, but there were multiple versions that could target multiple CPU architectures all from a similar interface, very handy for developers working across different platforms!
SN64 was a software development kit for the Nintendo 64 created by SN Systems and was especially popular with 3rd party game developers in the UK, but was never used by first or second party Nintendo 64 developers, so not many games were released that were built by it.
In the 1997 manual for SN64 titled PC Development System for the Nintendo 64 it references both the Cross products and original SNASM in what it calls compatible development systems:
PSY-Q was a development kit born from a partnership between popular UK-based game developer Psygnosis and SN Systems to develop a state-of-the-art development kit based on the C-programming language.
It was released for platforms such as the Super Nintendo 4 and SEGA Saturn but is most famous for its line of Sony PlayStation 1 Software Development Kits which were incredibly popular.
SN Systems were themselves bought by Sony in 2005 to exclusively create development tools for their upcoming Playstation 3 hardware.
The PSY-Q development kit was available for a wide range of platforms including the Super Nintendo where it was distributed with a custom development cartridge similar to a flash cartridge.
The PSY-Q development was such a success for Sony PS1 development that it actually became the officially licensed development kit for the platform. This was thanks to the partnership with Psygnosis as they had recently been bought by Sony and used this to present the SN Systems development kit to the Sony Management team 5.
Note that PSY-Q for PS1 was later rebranded as SDevTC (Sony Developer Toolchain) sometime before August 1999 as it is mentioned the rebranding in the Official Run-Time Library Overview from August 1999.
Even although Psygnosis were bought by Sony in 1993 (which held the Psy-Q branding), it supported a competing platform also under the PSY-Q branding, the Sega Saturn!
ProDG was the next step for SN Systems and provided development kits for both the Sony PS2 in 2000 and then the Nintendo GameCube in 2001 under this brand name, presumably this had nothing to do with Psygnosis at this stage.
Although the name ProDG was originally used to refer to the SN Systems IDE that supported PS1 & N64 development back in 1998 (released in June 1998 6), it seems they re-used this brand to refer to the whole development kit and not just the IDE 7.
SN Systems released their ProDG development kit for GameCube in 2001 and worked alongside the official Nintendo GameCube development kit (NR-Reader) by providing a SN-TDEV that was used for efficient debugging on the system.
There was also a version of ProDG available for the Game Boy Advance released in 2001 as an alternative to the official development kit from Nintendo.
ProDG was the third party SDK developed by SN Systems and later incorporated into the official PSP SDK when they got bought by Sony.
We have a post specifically about this SDK:
In issue 78 of the magazine Develop it was announced that version 2 of SN-DBS would be free for all developers on PS2, PS3 and PSP:
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Introduction What is the SN Systems ProDG PSP SDK? SN Systems were in the business of creating excellent 3rd party development tools and many game development studios relied on them... ...
SN Systems is a company that specialised in creating development tools for game developers in the UK, it was founded in 1989 by Martin Day and Andy Beveridge 1. Martin... ...
https://web.archive.org/web/19970521224105/http://www.snsys.com:80/ ↩ ↩2
Interview: Realtime Games Software (1989-08-12) by ST NEWS Disk Magazine - Sega Retro ↩ ↩2
Official SN Systems “PC Development System for the Nintendo 64” guide (Thanks to Ultra64.ca) ↩
Next Generation Magazine June 1995 issue ↩
Various goodies for yall :) PlayStation Development Network ↩
