Some Cross/SN/Psy questions

so did you managed to get hold of Psy-Q Blue DevCart?
I couldn't find it so I sold mine and got myself Cross CartDev Rev.B setups...

dennis

 

Ok… here’s the story, from what I remember...

Martin Day and Andy Beveridge were developing software for the Amiga and Atari ST. Deciding that the available assemblers sucked, they decided to write their own – naming it SNASM, or SN Assembler – the SN being a reference to something Monty Python, I think.

Martin’s assembler was written entirely in assembly language, ran incredibly fast and had an amazing macro language. A linker, SnLink, accompanied it. The suite was rounded out with a debugger coded by Andy, DBUG68K.

The Cross Products 68K Console interface was the development system of choice for US developers. The proprietary 8-bit ISA SCSI card allowed for fast code downloads and the debugger blew away other options such as the ZAX (which we used only for debugging with hardware breakpoints). The SN debugger for the Sega CD was really nice, as it allowed for instant switching between the CPUs.

Around the time the Mars (32x) was announced, Sega bought Cross Products and Martin and Andy split off to become a part of Psygnosis, leaving some people behind at Cross Products who believed they could actually create a development environment. Along came the Snasm2. The consensus around our office was a big “What the heck is this?†I had the unfortunate opportunity to use a Snasm2 on the Mars. It was more pleasant than debugging with punch cards… I’ll give it that.

At Psygnosis, Martin and Andy improved on their toolset, now called PsyQ. PsyQ’s were released for the 32x and Sega Genesis. Much to Sega’s disdain, most of Sega of America’s internal team quickly switched over to PsyQs, which easily plugged into the cart slot and had such nifty features like source level debugging. A PsyQ Saturn (with NMI mods for the box) followed. There were quite a few variations of the “yellow†PsyQ interface card produced. There was also a PsyQ released for the N64.

More important than the dying Genesis and never quite alive 32x was their PSX development environment. Software-wise, we had an assembler, debugger, and custom back-end for the Gnu C/C++ compiler. A windows version of the debugger was released (but it didn’t become really sweet until the PS2 days). The windows debugger required a hardware dongle that plugged into the parallel port. Most programmers don’t like plugging things into ports, so quite a few of us stayed using the DOS debugger on the PS1. I always believed it slowed a programmer down having to lift a hand off of the keyboard to select something with the mouse.

Speaking of the PS2, sometime before it was released, Martin and Andy left Psygnosis and became SN Systems. ProDG (pronounced “prodigyâ€) was released for the PS2 and NGC. Martin’s assembler is gone - the R3000 version was the last one made. Once a year, I fire him off an e-mail to to update it for the PS2, but no luck yet. Andy says he bugs him too. The dongle is gone too – replaced with a PGP license key that is tied to your MAC address.

 

Fascinating post, keep them coming :smt023