When I bought my playstation, I played Final Fantasy 8 for many hours, but my cheap cloned memory card lost its memory (That's what happen when you dont use Sony memory cards.).

I then realized that it would be very useful to be able to backup the content of a memory card in a computer. After searching the web, I discovered schematics to do this, and I even found sites where you can exchage save games!

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I found a few different schematics, but I chose the one which was the easiest to use from Linux(it works also with windows).

The version I chose is the Direct Pad Pro one.

Here is the schematic:

The interface would not be very useful without supporting software. I found only on windows program which was able to use the interface: Memory Card Capture Sakura. The software is a Japanese translation, and it is not very well translated and is strange. That's why I recommend that you use this software only to build a complete image of the memory card.

To do more complicated operations, I recommend PSX Game Edit.
PSX Game Edit allows you to save memory card blocks to separate files. This is very useful to mamage your savegames.

If you want to use Linux, I wrote a small program which directly supports the interface and is able to do basic management operations, such as saving separate blocks, deleting blocks, undeleting blocks, etc. You can find this software here: http://psxmem.raphnet.net

If you would like to write your own software, or want more information on memory card and the way data is stored on them, here is a good document:
Playstation.txt

There is a C library whichis able to use memory cards and controllers connected to a PC via the parallel port(and supports this interface). This library is Open source, so you can use it in your own programs(That's what I did in psxmem). You can download it from this site:
PSX Peripheral Bus Library