TheShaner, two questions for you...
- How did you deal with mitered joints with the laminate? I saw Epyx's awesome tutorial on laminate and that answered a lot of questions but I noticed that he was routing the laminate with a flush bit after applying it to a mitered edge. Now I know this sounds super anal but that would leave a 16th of an inch gap between the mating faces of the mitered corner rather than having a perfectly sharp joint. How did you do your mitered laminated corners?
- How many buttons did you use for your admin controls and what were they? My touchscreen software solution is planning to have 6 buttons so hopefully that is enough.
Not sure if this totally answers the question or not, but I only laminated the sides. So it is a flat piece of wood getting laminated. Then just compensate for the thickness of the laminate when doing your slot routing. The best bet will be to get a piece of wood of the same thickness as what you are working with for the sides and throw a piece of laminate on it. Then trial and error with the slot and a piece of test TMolding (you can order up to 2 samples from tmolding.com for free, they work perfectly for testing.) Once you have it perfect to where the tmolding just covers the thickness of the laminate, you are there.
On the admin buttons, I only have MAME set up fully right now, I am still working out the kinks of NES, SNES, and N64. I plan on doing a large number of consoles. For MAME, I really only have 3, but they are repeated on each side. Start, Pause, Coin. I have shifted everything else. So, shift start exits the game and acts as cancel out of menus etc. I originally had an exit up there, but the kids kept hitting it on accident while hitting the coin button. I will probably shift the coin eventually so it is not so easy to use for newbs that step up to the cab. I will want them to use quarters for the experience.
I am using MALA for my front end.
let me know if that didnt answer your question on the laminate.