the Joytech Xbox360 wired pads are common ground. I just hacked one… well I’m kinda in the process of finishing up the wiring. I got it for $25 from walmart 
It has MadCatz on the back tag but it says NEO Se JOYTECH. "This shape and design o this product is a trade dress of Mad Catz inc.
N14500
M/n 4716
Was a good surprise to discover it was common ground.
I used 4.7k ohm resistors. You need to take off the pots and sticks then use these pics as examples.
Triggers
http://i228.photobucket.com/albums/ee314/KaytrimsKustoms/Electronics/TriggerReplaced.jpg
Sticks
http://i228.photobucket.com/albums/ee314/KaytrimsKustoms/Electronics/ThumbstickReplaced.jpg
Wii Classic controller seems hackable.
I picked up a Wii Classic Controller on my way home from work today. Opened it up and poked around a bit with my multimeter.
The good news is, its 100% common ground. Seems like it will mostly be an easy hack, the only problematic part is the start/select/home buttons. For some reason these buttons have tiny, flat, pressure-sensitive micro-switches attached directly to the board which are NOT easy to remove. Fortunately, there is some exposed metal on each of the four corners of these switches. The bottom corners connect to ground, and the top corners seem to be the comm line for the switch. Looks like they’ll be a little tricky but not impossible to solder to. I might use 30 AWG wire for those.
The D-pad and face buttons all have that black conductive coating on the board, but it seems to scratch off fairly easily. All the other buttons have easily accessible solder points.
A few other points of interest:
The L and R triggers actually mechanically push down on both a digital button and an analog slider. This should make them easy to work with if I just leave the sliders on the board and use a drop of hot glue to keep them in place and use the digital button to wire to my stick.
The analog sticks are on a separate PCB, so they’d be really easy to remove, although you’d still have to hook up resistors to the wires connecting the analog board in order to neutralize the signals
Finally, like most nintendo devices, the outer casing is held together with tri-wing screws, so unless you have the right type of screwdriver, opening up the pad might be a bit tricky.
I’ll post an update when I finish hacking it.
-=The Jesster: Gatchaba Goose=-
Hi there!
I’m making an Xbox 360 Arcade Stick, installed with a P360 Happ Joystick. I’ve chosen to use the “Mad Catz Xbox 360 Classic Arcade” PCB. I have seen the pictures and mapping of the PCB from Slagcoin.com, however the version he has posted was a 2006 controller, and I have gotten my hands on a 2007 one.
I need help with a few things however.
First off, I need to know if their is anything considerably different with this 2007 model from the 2006 model.
Another thing is that I’m having trouble figuring out where the common ground is, if it has any, I’m to understand that most 360 PCBs don’t have a common ground, I’m wondering if this was one of those PCBs
Finally, I’m generally having trouble reading Slagcoin’s diagram, It mainly has to do with the fact that I’m more or less very inexperienced with reading PCBs. I read his instructions and everything, but I think I’m just too inexperienced to get it.
It might be too much to ask, but is it possible for anyone to create a diagram for this controller? If that is indeed too much to ask, maybe someone can help me read his diagram.
Below are the pictures of the PCB I’m using, the images are quite big ((1600x1200))
Also, here is the link from Slagcoin.com of the 2006 diagram of the same controller.
Thanks for the help everyone!
The pcb is slightly different, but it sure as hell looks almost identical. It looks like you can use the same contact points shown in slagcoin’s image. Under the top most slide switch is the spot where five wires from the USB cable are soldered in. They’re labelled on the top. Put one multimeter probe on either of the ‘EG’ wires on the left, and touch the other probe to pads. It is should show no resistance on one half of every pad.
So the half without the resistance will be the common ground yes? That is where I’ll need to make my connection with the solder?
Nope, that’s just to determine if its common ground. The OTHER half of each pad is the signal line. You’ll have to solder a wire from the signal line of each button and direction to the matching pushbutton or stick harness, then you’ll solder one wire to any one of the ground pads; that wire will be connected to the ground wire of your stick harness and the other pin of every pushbutton. Read up on slagcoin’s site, he explains it pretty well.
Alright I shall do that, thanks for the help again Toodles. I hope I wasn’t too much of a noobish bother.
anybody have any info on the gigaware 360 controllers from radioshack? going to the triumvir ST tourny this saturday and it’d be nice if I didn’t have to use the hori ex sticks.
So whats the easiest way to short a circuit on your board for a particular button? Ground crossed button; constantly firing now on the board. stupid mistake. Don’t need the button though so it’s ok as long as I can just get it to stop giving the signal.
answer: take an exacto knife, cut the circuit. I’m an idiot.
wait something was not made clear to me about doing a dpdt two console pad setup
the 360 madcatz pad has 5 wires for the usb plug
red,green,white,black,grey/a lighter black
i was wondering what happens to that fifth wire (the grey/lighter black) do i just omit it from the set up?
Its been afew months since I read through this thread, so i just wanted to check is the PSOne duelshock H series, universal ground?
Also can I cut off the rumble moters and L and R pcbs?
That fifth wire is the shielding ground. You can connect it to the ground line, or ignore it altogether.
i use’d 10k ohm resistors on the wireless 360 pad as per RDC’s thread. wired and soldered exactly how your pad shows. hopefully it still works when i get it all finished 
Ok, well I put together the stick today. However my problem is the X is always held down. If I press start and unpause the game the X will come out. I have undone X and tested it and it still happens. So anyone have any idea what is causing this? I guess it has something to do with the pad but cant figure it out.
I’m looking to add a GC PCB to a mas stick I have with me to play on the Wii. I’ve never done anything like this before, I’m a noob to padhacking.
I’ve disassembled a first party GC controller and I have it hooked up to the Wii right now. I can’t find the leads to the face buttons. Are they under the black stuff on the board? Can someone help me out or direct me to a guide of some sort?
Stumped
Well, I finished my Wii Classic controller pad hack.
Everything works except for the L/R triggers. Or rather, the triggers work fine in the Wii system menu (to scroll the screen left and right), but they don’t work at all in games (at least not the two games I tried them with: TvC and Castlevania: Judgement)
As I mentioned in my previous post, the triggers on the Wii Classic controller are somewhat odd in that the trigger mechanism actually presses down on both a digital button and an analog slider (variable resistor). So my initial plan was simply to lock the pot in its un-pressed state, and wire my joystick buttons up to the digital buttons. This seems to work fine for the Wii system menu, but it seems that games actually use the analog slider in some way.
The next thing I tried was to just bridge the digital button to the wiper contact on the pot, so they would both register as pushed down when I pressed the corresponding button. This caused the R trigger to continuously fire while in the Wii system menu (didn’t even get as far as booting up a game). A little more investigation showed why this happened. It turns out the trigger pots on the Wii Classic controller seem to work the opposite of most analog triggers. Resistance between the wiper and Ground is low (about .6-.7 kOhms) when the trigger is unpressed and this resistance goes up as the trigger is pressed down (maxing out at about 30 kOhms). So bridging the R trigger button to the wiper in its unpressed state dropped the voltage low enough to register as the button triggering.
So, finally I tried removing the pot altogether. I tested this with no further adjustments, then I tried putting a 10 kOhm resistor between the wiper and high-voltage contact on the pot, then I tried simply bridging the wiper to the high-voltage contact. All of these yielded the same result. The R-trigger worked in the system menu, but not in game. Then I tried using a small bit of wire to connect the wiper back and forth between ground and high while the game was running to see if I got any response from the game. Nothing.
I’m stumped. Anyone have any ideas what I can try to get this working? Has anyone verified that the L/R triggers on the classic controller actually work in TvC? Fortunately, TvC is a 4-button game, so I can make do without the triggers for now, but I’d really like to get this working 100%
-=The Jesster: Gatchaba Goose=-
Just picked up a new Madcatz controller from gamestop. 4716 on the back of it.
PCB looks slightly tweaked vs this one:
Here is mine, and what I think are the signals for each.
http://img185.imageshack.us/img185/7103/solderlocationsqf9.jpg
http://img185.imageshack.us/img185/4277/solderpoints2ra5.jpg
Now I have seen things referencing 5v rails… It appears that the central bank contains a 5v rail but I don’t have a multimeter here to measure it. What would the 5v lead even be used for, i am just hooking up 6 buttons and a stick to this pad hack…
Questions:
Without a multimeter here and from my picture, is it safe to say the leads with traces running back to the center of the board are the signal portions of the buttons? (seems logical and how other boards diagrams are mapped out)
Can I remove the joystick boxes? and then solder on the resistors to neutral out the joysticks in both axis? Or would it be simpler to mount the pad so the little sticks never move.
I need to neutral out the trigger buttons on both sides as well… After doing so can I solder a signal wire off the central connection so it functions as a regular button?
This appears to be the same type of construction as the older madcatz gamestop controllers… should I assume its a common ground? and if so is it acceptable to use ANY of the ground leads to do my grounding bar, or should I use a specific one or two?
thanks all.
I just wanted to point out that to the Gamecube/Wii, the aanalog slider, and the digital switch when it is pulled all of the way, are two entirely separate parts of the information the controller sends. The game can choose which one or both it actually wants to check for stuff. If you want to do it the best way possible, you need to wire it so your pushbutton does BOTH the digital switch and the analog slider.
A) You’d want to know where it is if using parts that require power, like a p360, sanwa flash, suzo inductive, or LED mod. If you’re all microswitches, you don’t need it.
1)Yup, good assumption.
2a. Yes. 2b. Yes, you’d have to if you removed it. 2c. Just dropping a little hot glue into the middle of the box so its permanently in neutral would be easiest and less error prone.
3)Heh, maybe. I think that may be the new version of the madcatz pad. If it is, then you’ll have to get kinky with the triggers to be able to use them like you want. Look for a thread in tech talk started by zombie cpt talking about the triggers for a madcatz in the title thread. I made a suggestion using transistors and a couple of resistors that appeared to work fro zombie cpt and akuma001 when they tried it.
4)It looks common ground, and if your setup is entirely microswitches, then just use the ground from any of the pads and you’ll be fine.