So my progress so far:
– “Liberated” the control box from the remainder of the soft pad, rendering the soft part useless.
– Used a recently purchased Dremel to drill into the top of the control box, making room for the output port, select button and start button.
– Hot glued the port and buttons into place (although one of the buttons doesn’t really want to stay, I made the hole a bit too big.
– Soldered most of the wires I need to the control board. The guide I was going by was for a third party Mad Catz DDR pad, which had nice, easy to connect to solder points with posts and all. The actual Konami version is harder, as there are very tiny holes and no posts, so I had to strip down the wires down to half of their threads, slip them through the holes and solder them to the flat part of the board.
– Verified the connections of the wires to various parts on the control board with continuity tester.
Next up is soldering up the last two wires (select and start) to be used for the switches, then soldering the other half of all the wires to the port and switches. I’m still a bit unsure about the stability of the wires, they are awfully fragile now that only half of them are used. I’m going to use electrical tape to tape them to the board after they all are soldered in, hopefully that will keep them from shifting too much and snapping off.