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I've been fighting with getting my PS3 gamepads to pair with my 2011 Mac Mini for the last couple of weeks and based on some other forum posts here, I believe my problems tie back to Remote Buddy (though, I'm perfectly willing to be wrong on that).
When I try to pair my PS3 gamepads to my mac mini, I use the following process: turn gamepads off, plug them into mac mini using USB cable, press and hold PS button for 3 seconds, release PS button, unplug gamepad. On my 2010 Macbook pro which has never had Remote Buddy installed on it (tested in Snow Leopard and Lion), both a Sixaxis and Dualshock gamepad pair instantly using this method. On my 2011 Mac Mini running Lion, I get a popup asking for a pairing code (I've tried 0000-0010 and they all fail to pair). Lion correctly identifies the PS3 controller trying to pair, but it won't pair for some reason unknown to me.
One of the reasons I'm speculating this may be a Remote Buddy issue is that I saw other threads here referencing similar problems with pairing a PS3 remote control (i.e. pairing code request popup appearing). At the advice of these threads, I deleted all bluetooth preferences files I could find (using all the directories listed on those threads, even the ByHost files). When I did this and rebooted, my sixaxis controller still generated the pairing code popup, but did successfully pair and was usable until I rebooted. At that point, using the same pairing process resulted in the pairing code popup and the controller would not pair. The dualshock controller also initially showed the pairing code popup and then paired successfully, but was not usable (tested in MAME OSX).
I should also mention that I have remote buddy set to run at startup and is the only software I can think of that deals with Bluetooth that is installed on my Mac Mini that isn't installed on my Macbook pro (both running the same OS).
I'm also running the most current version of Remote Buddy (1.18.1) in case that helps too.
I saw posts from Felix back in 2007 and 2008 saying that PS3 gamepad support was on his to-do list so I'm hoping that either he can offer some suggestions on what to try next or perhaps someone on these boards has already successfully tackled this problem.
I'll be glad to provide more information and/or test further and report back as needed. Thanks in advance for your help!
