tablet puck as pendant?

[foamcutter]

I have several old tablet pucks ( mouse like thing) that went with the older calcomp and summagraphics tablets. The ones I refer to have 16 buttoms on them and a plug similiar to a network plug or phone plug on steroids. There are 8 wires in the plug. Here's my question (finally) Could this be used as a machine control pendant with software like Mach 2 and if so how do I find out which wires go to which pins on a serial port plug so it could be hooked up? I am guessing that I would need to cut off the old plug and wire in a serial port plug to use it but what wire goes where on the new plug? How would I figure this out without smoking something? Any ideas? Thanks for any input. Ron