Reusing a gamepad board with weird wiring

[msx]

Hi, i'm new here so hello everybody
I have an old gamepad with terrible buttons, i'd like to reuse the PCB inside to connect it to a joystick kit (like the ones you can find everywhere on amazon etc). It seemed like a simple task until i looked at the PCB:



On the right are the game buttons, they're wired as expected: each two contacts are GND and a button specific pin. They even offer pads to access the traces and solder a wire

On the left is the joystick connection. I expected the same thing as for the buttons, but it's not. They're connected to each other in the following way, which i reconstructed looking at traces and with a tester:



The blue connection is ground, the others are all pin specific. Looks like the yellow goes throu a 1k resistor, the rest of the pins go straight to the IC.

So is this thing common? I've not much experience but i've always seen each pin paired with GND. How does it works exacly?

And most importantly: if i have a joystick like this one, with a 5 pin connector, am i still able to wire it to the pcb somehow ?

Thanks in advance!

[Vocalitus]

Do yourself a favor and get an encoder board for $8.

You will thank me later.  Soldering those pads can be troublesome.  I remember PC pad hacks back in the early days.....

[msx]

Do yourself a favor and get an encoder board for $8.

You will thank me later.  Soldering those pads can be troublesome.  I remember PC pad hacks back in the early days.....

Hi! I have some of those.. The problem is: they all appear identical from the USB point of view (same vendor id and product id), and i can't distinguish them in the system. When i unplug one, or start the pc with both plugged, the system (linux+retroarch) assing random users to each joystick. I haven't been able to tell it to keep any joystick to a specific player. If anyone has a solution on this it would be greatly appreciated!

For context, my cabinet is single player but i have a second joystick that i plug when i have guests playing.

[Mike A]

Some of those encoder boards have P1 and P2 inputs on the same board.

I imagine that would solve your problem.