The "proper" answer is that you need to be working for a professional developer and pay for expensive devkits.

One of the conditions of becoming an "official" developer is you (your company) sign a contract which prevents you from disclosing specific programming details/information to the general public. What that means is much of the information on how to get the most out of the consoles isn''t available to amateurs. What information is out there tends to have been leaked and is technically illegal to have (copyright infringement etc).

For the PS2, Sony are releasing a Linux based programming environment specifically for amateur developers. You won''t get the full documentation or full access to the machine etc, but it should be enough to learn the essence of PS2 programming. This seems to be similar to what they did with the PSX and Net Yaroze. Sony also released a version of the BASIC programming language called YABASIC for the PS2 in some territories.

AFAIK there isn''t anything similar at the moment for the GameCube.


The "not so proper" answer is that there are enough people interested in knowing how to program these consoles that they''ve been reverse engineering the OS, working out how the hardware works etc. There *are* websites out there which carry information and source code - they don''t always stay active for long though since they''re sometimes on shaky legal ground.

Try something like PS2+development as a search term in your favourite search engine and you''ll likely find some.


--
Simon O''Connor
Creative Asylum Ltd
www.creative-asylum.com