rom hacking was where most were from and they were broken
and reason we didn't advertise at the start is because I don't have a lot of money and we wanted to try to do it ourselves
I hear you on DIY. With ROM Hacking community, it is a very meeeh community imo. I have been in the OG ROM hacking discords since Discord's launch, these servers are mostly dead and no one really talks much, much less dev talk. ROM hacking forums have some useful tutorials buuut their usefulness ends when it comes to projects "more involved" than building a retrocade raspberry pi system to emulate your favorite games or to make a mod of pokemon.
Moemon discord server and forum, a rom hack community dedicated to total conversion of pokemon to moe type waifu monsters, is probably the only really significant achievement of the whole bit.
Since PSX, PS2, Atari Jaguar, Sega Saturn/SegaCD, Gamecube and PSP hacking involves the whole deal of ISOs and games built under Linux/unix based OS with everything locked in Binary Packages, most of the ROM hacking community is not exactly "tech literate" enough to hack, mod or DIY original titles for these systems. As result like there's not a whole lot out there on how to do things.
ROM hacking also mainly focuses on simply only "modding" games by asset replacement. They don't actually from ground up build "original games". Further, they focus on GB/GBC/GBA or NES/SNES ROMS as working with others such as SEGA or Atari, requires actually working in assembly programming which is a thing they avoid like its the friggin plauge. Of note, GBA even at some points requires working in modern Z80 assembly so there are fewer GBA hacks than GB or GB color.
ROM hacking also took a backburner when they lost most of their community to the fantasy console revolution of Pico 8, Tic80, Pixel Vision 8 and GB Studio. These made it insanely easier to make retro games, in many areas eliminated need for coding, and what coding remained was simple object oriented mid to high level coding systems (no longer working in low level assembly requiring direct hardware addressing coding).
With ROM tools becoming broken, thats not entirely the ROMHacking communities fault though. Switch to x64 win architecture, win10 to win11 transition and just compatibility issues as emulator cores got more uptodate while abandoned ROM hack tools did not, is mostly what's to blame with that.
With ps2 of note, as mentioned a propper ps2 emulator did not exist until 2014. Meaning psp emus popped up before ps2 ones. When they did finally arrive there was only one or two abd they were quite glitchy/broken as hell. I stopped following ps2 emulator dev around 2018 but between 2014 n 2018 there was not much progress made within it.
Further, we still to my knowledge lack a ps3 emulator, and will probably never get one. This because the same GPU chip in the ps3 is used by US military forces in drone sat recon systems along with used onboard the Javelin's onboard camera target sightmark intercept system. So, since the hardware is technically top secret miltech, still, it's not likely to get an address port and code dump reveal so making an emulator for it is not entirely possible.
With ps2 resources, there are some rips around, you can get ISO clones of most PS2 games but there is still an overwhelming lack of devtools, emulators that function reliably and stablely, and there has not been much of a push in community to fix those things.
Focus instead has been more "retro blindered" to developing emus and devtools for the PSX. Which, the PSX was not fully address sector revealed until 2014-2017 and was only done so because some music nerd personally took one apart and spent 5 years address
mapping it by hand with a multi-meter.
I will take a look around this weekend and see what I can dig up on ps2 rips, hacks and indie dev but dunno if much has changed since 2019 in that arena.
In meantime, upon PS2's initial release, was a prehiprial kit used to turn the PS2 into a devkit Linux system. Doing this made it so that it no longer played ps2 games but allowed you to then use that Linux PS2 to directly dev ps2 games on that system. To date, as far as I am aware, this is the only "real" public devkit for PS2 modding or indie game making outside of using outdated versions of Unreal Engine to export a game in ps2 format. It is worth looking into that devkit to figure out how the set up worked and what tools might be available still in making assets that can mod or port to new ps2 games.