I am trying to connect a joystick to my pc. The device has a serial cable which is supposed to be inserted into another device (a steering wheel), but instead I want to use it directly. Eventually I plan to connect it to a program that am currently writing.

How can I communicate with this device? I know how to communicate to a serial device, I just don't understand what I should send and expect to receive.

Debugging attempts:

If I connect it directly to my PC's serial device and using a program such as moserial I can sort of communicate with it, if I pound on the keyboard it returns (usually) one byte and "=

" per byte sent. The return codes do not seem to always correspond to the state of the joysitck. It seems to be returning the same value for the same value. Once or twice I noticed that if I send a large amount of random data I can get it to hang until I switch the position of the joystick. But for the most part there seems to be nonsensical responses (same input per output regardless of state). I also tried a serial-to-usb converter which had a different result. Under USB the device does pretty much nothing regardless of the baud rate. I have noticed that if I send an incredible amount of random kepresses I occasionally get a single unprintable character in response.

I was expecting to get a continuous stream of numbers corresponding to the state of the joystick.

Summary: I don't know if my direct serial connection is just showing noise, I did try a second serial to USB converter which had the same results. Any ideas or suggesting in determining how to communicate with this device?