Argonaut had several team members including Rick Clucas (CTO) who had hardware design experience as well as software. Rick's first hardware at Argonaut was a development cartridge for the SNES that allowed you to remote control it and download games from the pc development kit. This allowed us to be self sufficient and develop games earlier on SNES (and less expensively than others)

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)

From what has been said of the latter. Argonaut showed up to Nintendo's booth (E3, CES etc. I forget which one specifically)

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