Yes, I remember reading something on the Project 64 site about some new debugging features in 1.7. I think I even posted it here a while back. Back then, I knew nothing about hacking, and it was a quite poorly-written post.
And in my opinion, Renegade 64 is one of the best things to use for hacking. There was also the debug version of PJ64 1.6 that had a couple useful features. Subdrag posted the link to it in the first Hacking lesson topic, but that's long gone. I've searched for it with no good results.