yaroze was outside of my budget, but thankfully there was another option, there was a commercial game cheat device that could be reflashed with a "caetla" rom which when hooked up to the parallel port on a pc, could be used to ship binaries over from linux. the gcc-mips toolchain worked a treat and there was a header file laying around that implemented the user space wrappers for making system calls into the in-rom kernel.
my fun exploratory project: porting the mpg123 decoder over to the psx1, thereby bringing mp3s to the living room. i was able to get it to decode one frame at a time very slowly on the r3000 (25mhz) cpu with no fpu, but didn't have the skill at the time to embark on an optimization project that maybe could have made use of the rudimentary graphics acceleration (it was some kind of limited integer math accelerator, iirc).