For a long time, the Playstation™ (and nowadays the PSOne™) was the most successful home console which fastly took over the part of the Super Nintendo™ (or Super Famicom™ in Japan). Although the hardware concept was worse than the Nintendo 64™, the Sony Playstation had it's advantages and for most people the reason to get it was being able to backup or copy games.

First generation consoles always used cardtridges to hold their games on and even the N64 used cartridges and you could only copy these carts using expensive copy-devices as the Doctor 64 etc.

Using a special firmware (called Caetla) for a cheat-cartridge called XPloder or Exploder you could transfer self written executables via a serial link into your Playstation. But your executables could not easily access the CD-ROM.

Only bad-news for the hobby-coders is that there is no freeware high-level development environment available and everyone is trying to get the PSyQ kit which Sony sells to official developers.

But you may compile the GCC Cross Compiler for target platform MIPS to get at least the compiler running without high-level libraries.