Nice Writeup, but common/old and not really a Hack…

yea its common, but I haven’t seen this good of a write up ever, usually your lucky to get a text file with some pin-outs and kinda have to kludge the conversion together in your brain

This won’t work for most microsoft sidewinder products though, as they used a digital-over-analog protocol. A very nice chap over on the descent forums has a mostly open black-box that decodes the data from the joysticks and has a USB interface. It’s an OLD project, but the last update seems to have been in November. (Search for the words “project archive”, the text’s tiny)
http://grendel.koolbear.com/3dpro.htm

A slightly wasteful newer version using the Teensy microcontroller is here:
http://www.descentbb.net/viewtopic.php?t=15526

Should I submit something like this?

I’ve seriously considered making a Dr. Evil like chair with the joystick and everything for rotation… this could be a gold-mine ;P

When I use old analog joysticks I always pop them open and solder the 5V line (it’s already present) to the other side of the potentiometers. That converts the rheostat-type output to voltage-divider output. Then just use ADC inputs, no need to mess around with external capacitors, calibration, or low-functionality threshold based detection (or topheavy exponential calculations).

@Rupin
I don’t think a Basic Stamp can handle USB comms…