SN Systems is a provider of

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for se ...

based development tools for games consoles, including the

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, and PSP. The company had provided tools for the

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Game Boy Advance The (GBA) is a 32-bit handheld game console developed, manufactured and marketed by Nintendo as the successor to the Game Boy Color. It was released in Japan on March 21, 2001, in North America on June 11, 2001, in the PAL region on June 22, ...

, and

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History

The company was founded in 1990 by Martin Day and Andy Beveridge. Both directors have backgrounds of developing game console software development tools, such as SNASM and Psy-Q, at Cross Products and later

Psygnosis Psygnosis Limited (known as SCE Studio Liverpool or simply Studio Liverpool from 1999) was a British video game developer and publisher headquartered at Wavertree Technology Park in Liverpool. Founded in 1984 by Ian Hetherington, Jonathan Ell ...

. SN Systems' long association with the

line of consoles began in 1993, when PlayStation manufacturer Sony acquired Psygnosis, who were publishing SN Systems' tools at the time. While Sony had provided

MIPS R4000 MIPS may refer to: Technology * Million instructions per second, a measure of a computer's central processing unit performance * MIPS architecture, a RISC instruction set architecture * Multiband Imaging Photometer for Spitzer, an instrument on ...

-based

Sony NEWS The Sony NEWS ("Network Engineering Workstation", later "NetWorkStation") is a series of Unix workstations sold during the late 1980s and 1990s. The first NEWS machine was the NWS-800, which originally appeared in Japan in January 1987 and wa ...

workstations for PlayStation development, Psygnosis disliked the thought of developing on these expensive workstations and asked SN Systems to create a PC-based development system. At the 1994 Winter

Consumer Electronics Show CES (; formerly an initialism for Consumer Electronics Show) is an annual trade show organized by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA). Held in January at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Winchester, Nevada, United States, the event t ...

, Psygnosis arranged an audience for SN Systems with Sony's Japanese executives, and Sony were impressed enough with their development tools that they decided to abandon their plans for a workstation-based development system in favor of using SN Systems' development system exclusively. In 1999, SN Systems won a ''Game Developer Magazine'' "Front Line Award" in the Programming Environment category for its Nintendo 64 development product called SN64. The company won again in 2005, this time for the ProDG for PSP suite. SN Systems was acquired by

Sony Interactive Entertainment Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), formerly known as Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE), is a multinational video game and digital entertainment company wholly owned by multinational conglomerate Sony. The SIE Group is made up of two legal co ...

Inc. in 2005, to provide tools for the PlayStation 3, and future consoles. Based in

Bristol, England Bristol () is a city, ceremonial county and unitary authority in England. Situated on the River Avon, it is bordered by the ceremonial counties of Gloucestershire to the north and Somerset to the south. Bristol is the most populous city in ...

, they have satellite offices in

Campbell, California Campbell is a city in Santa Clara County, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. As of the 2020 U.S. Census, Campbell's population is 43,959. Campbell is home to the Pruneyard Shopping Center, a sprawling open-air retail complex which was i ...

and

Dublin, Ireland Dublin (; , or ) is the capital and largest city of Republic of Ireland, Ireland. On a bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the Provinces of Ireland, province of Leinster, bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, a part of th ...

Products

Central to the SN Systems product line is the ProDG suite, comprising a

compiler In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs tha ...

and integration with

Microsoft Visual Studio Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs including websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Visual Studio uses Microsoft software development platforms such ...

, together with a

debugger A debugger or debugging tool is a computer program used to test and debug other programs (the "target" program). The main use of a debugger is to run the target program under controlled conditions that permit the programmer to track its executi ...

and additional build tools.

References

{{Sony Interactive Entertainment Windows games Programming tools for Windows Sony Interactive Entertainment British companies established in 1990 Companies based in Bristol Software companies established in 1990 Software companies of England Video game development companies 2005 mergers and acquisitions