How to make motor switch direction

I have an old computer joystick that has a pan switch. (like if you were in a fighter and needed to look up you push the pan switch up and it looks up…same goes for left and right and down.) the little board that it is hooked up to has the ground connected to each switch(the pan controller has really just 4 push button switches in it for each direction). then there are the other four wires that come off the switches. I am able to hook a motor up and get it to move one direction when i push pan up, but when I push pan down it still goes the same direction. I know it has not changed polarity.
Does anyone know a simple way to make it so if i were to push a button, the motor would spin one way, and if i were to push another button the motor would spin the other way( reversing the polarity).
If you need it clarified more please let me know. Thanks Justin

Hello.

In general, what you’re looking for isn’t that easy to do if you don’t already know how. However, if your switches are quite beefy (not so likely) and the motor is small, you could get away with using two sets of batteries: you would connect the sets in series and connect that common point to one side of the motor, you would connect the other side of the motor to the common point between the switches (they don’t really have to be connected to ground, right?), and the other sides of the switches would connect to the two remaining battery ends. You’ll have to make sure you don’t ever close both switches at once since that would short out the batteries, but your joystick probably makes that impossible.

Since this depends on the motors and switches, you might post more details about those if you want to discuss this further.

- Jan