"AAA" publishers of the period definitely used larger systems, all the way up to VAXen, but smaller devs worked on the systems themselves because that's all the

"AAA" publishers of the period definitely used larger systems, all the way up to VAXen, but smaller devs worked on the systems themselves because that's all they had. If you buy some teenager's game for £10 at the chemist's, that teenager can't afford a large powerful system to develop with. I seem to recall an interview with Paul Urbanus in which he noted that the graphics for Parsec on the TI-99/4A were designed on the TI-99/4A, which to him proved the machine as a tool for serious creative work.