I use to be in the console scene in the late 90's. I had homebrew n64 & psx dev kits, and there were leaks of libraries, docs for both consoles. Perhaps because PSX was new, they were more tolerating back then, as a matter of fact, some of the ideas and tools from the scene made it into their toolkit and a few of the console hackers ended up working for Sony. Strangely, I recall never been too concerned about Sony but terrified about Nintendo to not discuss what I had with strangers on IRC. So Nintendo has always been mean. Hell, if you hacked and made your own cart without going through them, they would sue you back then. If anything threatened Sony, it was once emulators started working and catching up, but by then I had left the scene.
Manuals where PDF that was shared in private circles. Both consoles were MIPS, so built with gnu cross compilers. All we really had was the gcc compilers & libraries. All other tools were custom built.
