Hold your horses, that doesn't mean it will work. Normally those just take the signal and throw it on to the joystick pins, they would still carry a signal over one of them and would probably be undeciphrable without some other circuit. There may be some out there that do decipher the signal, but it would be different per each usb device.

Sorry.

Yes. We did that for our control board. We took a standard DB-15 cable and soldered a connector to individual wires on the cable. It was a big pain figuring out all the wire colors on a DB-15 cable, but it all works now. Just make sure you connect all the pins you need (especially the aux power one, I forgot that one and it took 3 hours to figure it out).