Hardware a development manual for Sculptured Software's custom SNES (1990-1992) devkit has been scanned and released online.

[Krvavi Abadas]

The first Super NES development system created by Sculptured came to life in the fall of 1990. The board, deemed the SFX-1, was based on the de-engineering of the Japanese Super Famicom console. It contained ram to emulate up to 8 Mega bits of rom space. The SFX-1 was designed to be used in conjunction with an IBM PC or compatible, and connects via common parallel ports. A 25 Megahertz 386 is the recommended minimal system. Utilities were created to support the hardware such as a background artwork utility, sprite animator, symbolic debugger, a cross assembler, digitized voice and sound generation and playback, sound and music generation/editing/driver. The SFX-1 hardware fits conveniently under the SFX console in an aluminum box, and the utilities reside on your IBM PC hard drive.

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the manual describes four notable tools used by the studio. Berlioz (a music and sound creation tool), Rocks (a sprite creation utility), EON (a background art editor), and SDEBUG (a debugger).

this manual is particularly notable as it demonstrates how developers used to scrounge up custom hardware for production prior to the standardization of development kits. proper 1st-party SNES dev kits would be eventually be made, such as this one claimed to have been used by legendary game designer Sid Meier.

but even Nintendo themselves had to build up custom hardware prior to this, with early work on the system being done using Sony's NEWS workstations.


as late as the N64 era, devs were still scraping up alternative solutions to save on the costly fees of acquiring 1st-party kits. with the Doctor V64 (a cartridge copier normally used for piracy.) being nabbed by large studios such as Acclaim to quickly debug projects.

(image on the right is sourced from an episode of the Discovery Channel series "Forbidden Places" made in 2000.)