thecheat, Chadtower and richms: the traces are more of a gold colour than orange, so I guess that might be the issue. Never thought about that. Tinning the wires is no problem at all, so I don't think it's the iron's power or a dodgy tip. Bu then, it's not like I know a lot about these things. Oh, and I chose to do a gamepad hack because I wanted to see if I could make something more so than just having an arcade controller. If I ever make an actual cab though, I'll be thinking about an I-PAC, for the reasons thecheat stated.
As a general update, my uncle came around and helped me out. This kind of stuff, including soldering, was his area of study. To tin the traces (one of the few I hadn't killed

), he laid the iron on them and then touched the solder to the tip of the iron to melt it and then ran the iron along the trace, 'painting' on the solder as it went. I tried it out after him and once I did that, and soldered on the wires, I plugged the PCB into the computer via it's USB cable. I touched the wires from the trace I soldered to together and they registered as button presses.
Now I'm no less confused, as I was under the impression that this was the wrong way to solder and would cause a cold joint that wouldn't work. My uncle reassured me that this was not the case. I've come across a video where it looked as if the guy was using this same method. It's this one:
Needless to say, I don't know what's going on.
