Why did Argonaut have the ability to design early GPU hardware when it doesn't seem like anyone else had the interest, background knowledge or tools?
(And how did Nintendo find a company in the UK to work with considering the language barriers?)
(And how did Nintendo find a company in the UK to work with considering the language barriers?)
And Fuzzz (aka James Hakewill, now at Tesla AI) was designing silicon including The ARC.
its a pretty well known story as to how we got involved with Nintendo.
I went up to a senior Nintendo guy at a CES show and showed him some stuff that blew him away. I was on a flight to meet Mr Yamauchi in Japan a few days later.
We had Argonaut team members stationed inside Nintendo working directly for Mr Miyamoto, et al
our team back in UK did the tech stuff, and the team inside Nintendo built the games.
It was only the second time that Nintendo had worked with a company outside Japan (the first was Rare ltd)
They pulled out a Nintendo Gameboy and proceeded to put an unlicensed prototype game cartridge in it, which booted successfully even without Nintendo's approval
Nintendo was so impressed with the engineering talent they agreed to work with them thereafter