A PSP linked to the Mac

Mac Connectivity

First thing first, USB.
On the main interface screen, the PSP has a USB Connection menu.

Select it and the PSP enters in USB mode.

You can now connect the PSP to the Mac using one of these normal-to-small USB (not included), like those provided with digital cameras.

It is basically now a USB mass storage device, just like some digital cameras or like USB media card readers. It mounts the Memory Stick on the Mac’s desktop, where you can rename it or browse its content.

The memory stick has a predefined structure (once you have formatted it with the PSP), a bit like OSX and I wouldn’t recommend messing with it since it won’t look outside of the 4 base directories: GAME, MUSIC, PHOTO and SAVEDATA. GAME seems to be for demo/games that you can download and run off the memory stick, SAVEDATA is for the game saves (cool for backing up you game data or sharing them), MUSIC can contain MP3 or Sony’s ATRAC3Plus (what?) music files, that you can organize in folders, but the MP3 player does not have any sort of playlist feature (more on this later) but that might change since the console has a software update feature (more later too), PHOTO can hold JPEG files that can be viewed in slideshows on the console.

A bad mark here for OSX which leaves invisible dot-files all over the place (.DS_Store and a dot-file for the icon of each file, like “.14 Let's Get It Started.mp3” for the “14 Let's Get It Started.mp3” file), which the PSP DOES NOT ignore, showing them as corrupt image or picture files (see the small « broken » icon in the screenshot)… annoying !

I’m sure some OSX hacker will come up with a neat file transfer utility for the PSP. For now, I just clean all the dot-files from the memory stick using terminal.

Well, that’s it for USB connectivity, now on to network connectivity.