What kind of connector for interchangeable CP's?

[Frostillicus]

I know a lot of folks have made interchangeable CPs, but what type of connector do you use? I searched but couldn't find much. 25pin connectors?

I'm interested in building more than one CP and need a solution to quickly connect each one both to an optipac and ipac4 player.  Thats a lot of inputs.  Probably gonna need a couple of different cables, though if there is one big one out there that'd be cooool.  Are there any special cables made for this type of quick-disconnect with a lot of pins?

Thanks all!

[Jungle]

I think you can get some SCSI cables that are 50 pin...not sure of anything larger than that.

[eightbit]

32pins in a floppy cable, 40 pins in IDE, 50 or 68 pins in scsi. 25 pins in serial extension cables. I used serial extension cables and this worked great for my 2p control panel.
Don't use printer cables.

[Larry Smith]

Whats wrong with printer cables? They work fine in my cab.

[SirPoonga]

Whats wrong with printer cables? They work fine in my cab.

He answered in another post.  Basically printer cables don;t always come with all the wires as they aren;t needed most of the time.

[electricd]

Yea I found this out the hard way!  I did find that the easiest way (for me) to get the wiring right is to use flat ribbon cable.  Very easy to find and cheap to buy.  I used 3 25pin cables for my panels.  1 cable for player 1, 1 for player 2, and one for aux controls and opticals.  Seemed to work out great.

ED7

[eightbit]

Whats wrong with printer cables? They work fine in my cab.

Printer extension cable will work and its exactly the same thing as a serial extension cable, most regular printer cables won't.
quote author=electricd7 link=board=1;threadid=4824;start=0#31271 date=1044592061]
Yea I found this out the hard way!  I did find that the easiest way (for me) to get the wiring right is to use flat ribbon cable.  Very easy to find and cheap to buy.  I used 3 25pin cables for my panels.  1 cable for player 1, 1 for player 2, and one for aux controls and opticals.  Seemed to work out great.

How many buttons do you have on your control panel?  Unless  you wired all your grounds seperately or have a whole bunch of administrative buttons 1 25 pin should have been enough.

[Frostillicus]

How many buttons do you have on your control panel?  Unless  you wired all your grounds seperately or have a whole bunch of administrative buttons 1 25 pin should have been enough.

Well, one joystick has at least 4 inputs(not counting grounds), so I think my original idea is to somehow make a cable that would utilize all the 4playerIpac AND some inputs on an optipac.   If I wanted to make a 4-player CP I'd need more than a 25 pin connector.  4 joysticks alone would be 16 connections(plus one ground). After looking for scsi cables(68 pin) on the web, I've found that they are rather expensive.

electricd7: How durable are ribbon cables?  Are you using the internal HDD ribbon cables? Seems like they'd get shredded if you change them a lot.  

After some consideration, I think I'll just make a setup like 1UP's rotating CP.  Maybe scaled a little bigger like the regular one I already made(for D9200).  I think it'd be a great project and would eliminate not only this connector problem but I wouldn't have extra CPs cluttering up my apt.  Plus it's just darn kewl.  
Thanks all for the input!