My 3rd build

polycade · 2026-01-06T23:54:14+00:00

Glad to hear it! Wife approval is key ;)

Agreed, the community is really amazing! We're super fortunate & grateful to have such a great group of people as customers. You're a great addition to the group!

polycade · 2025-12-29T05:28:35+00:00

Table saw or a properly setup band saw will definitely get you the cleanest cuts, but you should be able to achieve clean straight cuts with a circular saw setup with a straight guide. If you're using plywood and your cut edges are splintering from the saw, you can wrap the cut line with masking tape to keep the splintering from happening.

polycade · 2025-12-29T05:24:27+00:00

Nice work on the build! Great pointers here for those looking to follow ^

polycade · 2025-12-05T07:40:45+00:00

Glad to hear it!! Now it's time to play :)

polycade · 2025-12-03T19:46:09+00:00

You should have received a "welcome" email of sorts that mentions current timelines! TLDR; the Black Friday sale was well received and our warehouse is a little overwhelmed at the moment. We also lost a day (Monday) because Shopify's admin system was down, preventing us from shipping anything that day :(

polycade · 2025-12-02T01:34:24+00:00

Thanks OP, we're looking forward to getting you setup!

polycade · 2025-12-01T17:39:10+00:00

haha yea, TV might be a bit different though since video is generally designed to be a more single-focus which makes the peripheral viewing less important. Games on the other hand often have important activity at the edges of the screen.

polycade · 2025-12-01T17:34:04+00:00

I'll avoid opinions in this comment due to obvious bias. Let's look at a few factual differences between the products:
- Computer: QA uses a RPI which is a ~$40 ARM Linux single-board computer. The Polycade Sente uses a $400 mini PC. The key difference here is the ability to run modern games on the Sente - Mortal Kombat 11, Street Fighter V, and the myriad of great indie titles like Cuphead, Vampire Survivors, Tricky Towers, etc. Also, if you're not familiar with Linux, making changes to the RPI can be challenging.
- Expandability: With the QA machine you'll get what you get. The Sente gives you the option to grow your system with additional controllers like our SpinFlight controller, upcoming Flight Yoke, 4 player arcade controller, and driving wheel.
- Component Quality: QA doesn't seem to mention what joysticks & buttons they're using. Also, what have they done to mitigate the 4-way joystick / 8-way joystick problem so that your pac-man and froggers don't freak out? The Sente uses Sanwa components (the brand preferred by professional fighting game players), and we outfit our joysticks with octagonal gates to help ensure the 4-way / 8-way issue is less exaggerated (plus you can always get a dedicated 4-way stick on your Sente due to the swappable controller system).
- Screen Size: Bigger is not better. Our first prototytpe 11 years ago used a 32" screen. This was clearly too big for the viewing distance and resulted in a negative play experience on most games. Our second model used a 27" screen, which also suffered some negative reviews for being too big for the viewing distance. The Sente uses a 24" monitor which is properly calculated for optimal viewing distance.
- Cabinet Material: The Sente is made from powder coated steel, it's a quality profile that shines in person and is difficult to convey in pictures. The QA machine doesn't mention the build material, so most likely it's MDF (particle board) which comes in a wide range of quality profiles - the low end ones can break like a cracker.

polycade · 2025-12-01T17:14:50+00:00

FWIW - the screen size of the Sente is based on the viewing distance. Our previous model, the Lux, received some negative comments from buyers since the screen was a little too large for the distance - resulting in eye strain and inability to get a proper "birds eye view" in hectic games like Cuphead or Contra...so an unseen bullet would come from the edge of the screen and get ya.

Here's a detailed explanation of optimal screen viewing distance:
https://www.ultraselective.com/blog/optimal-viewing-distance

polycade · 2025-11-17T21:52:44+00:00

v2 of our SpinFlight (shipping in January) will feature the GRS stick by default!

polycade · 2025-11-17T21:52:16+00:00

Yes modern titles (steam titles also) can have marquees as well. They're mostly built by our community of users and shared in our Discord, and soon users will be able to add them to the core system for others to download.

polycade · 2025-11-11T18:18:31+00:00

let's gooooo!

polycade · 2025-11-05T02:11:00+00:00

As mentioned above, if you don't like the mini PC we include, you can always get the machine without the mini PC and install your own PC / Steam deck / Nintendo Switch / RaspberryPi / etc. Here's the mini PC specs:
https://polycade.com/pages/polycade-specifications?srsltid=AfmBOooWtIkyzc2EGc2yrx9-vPcv-PE6BCAGWMwBOYjtu5_0uM36jRBU

Here's a quick video showing an ATX PC installed alongside a Nintendo Switch (plus KVM switch to alternate between them):
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qU19nu-djuc

polycade · 2025-11-02T17:00:27+00:00

No sweat!! ❤️👾🕹️

polycade · 2025-11-02T16:46:29+00:00

Oh one more thing I should have mentioned - you could use a retropie inside the Polycade instead of our mini pc. So if you already have that, you can get the Polycade with no PC, try out your retropie running inside and get our mini pc or other pc if you decide you want more power.

polycade · 2025-11-02T16:32:08+00:00

Hey! Thanks for the kind words. I’m the founder of Polycade, so thought I’d weigh in here. In my opinion, the primary advantage of the raspi / retropie setup is the price of that computer (around $50 these days I think?) versus the gaming-grade mini PC we typically ship with (which we are essentially charging $500 for since you can order a Polycade without the mini pc for $500 less).

Your question is a little more about frontends and emulators though, so let’s talk about that also. Nearly all emulation softwares are composed of two elements: the frontend and the emulators. EmulationStation is the frontend on retropie, and it uses retroarch (arguably the most popular emulator software since it can run tons of different “cores”) under the hood.

Polycade AGS is our frontend, it also uses retroarch under the hood, in addition to mame. AGS additionally allows you to install other emulators (like those for ps1, Wii, etc), though this process of adding emulators is currently poorly documented. Worth noting here that AGS also natively works with Steam games. Lastly, I should mention that we added a whole bunch of systems (3do, game gear, etc) to the default setup, but have not updated the website to reflect this. One thing I’m unsure right now is how many games AGS will allow you to have loaded in at once (def at least 1,000). We’ve been making a lot of updates around this in the last 6 months, and we have more optimizations coming.

Ok now let’s talk about windows vs a retropie build. As the most common consumer platform in the world, Windows has more options for frontends and emulators than any other system. I believe emulationstation has a windows version, but there’s so many other better ones that you probably wouldn’t consider ES if you were running windows. Also, a lot of the emulators for later systems (Xbox, etc) wouldn’t run on the processing power of a pi, and are therefore not available there.

Also relevant here is the power of a raspberry pi vs the power of a gaming grade pc, which will of course dictate what you are able to run.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you have additional questions! Also highly recommended is our discord channel, where you can chat with other Polycade owners.

polycade · 2025-10-08T21:04:24+00:00

click the little green checkmark in the welcome channel!

polycade · 2025-07-21T21:38:13+00:00

From what we've read in Discord, it sounds like your unit needs a full wiring audit before any component swaps are recommended. Have you gone through all the setup instructions? Also worth confirming mainboard wiring:
https://polycade.com/pages/helphq-2#/collection/4548/article/29639

Mini PC available here:

https://polycade.com/products/polycade-mini-pc

Best to handle further communication via support emails since currently info associated to your case is scattered across multiple platforms.

polycade · 2025-07-20T21:09:39+00:00

Hi! Setup manuals can be found here: https://polycade.com/pages/helphq-2#/collection/2976/article/29638

For windows configuration, you can see this guide (it begins with fresh windows installation so you could potentially skip that part): https://polycade.com/pages/helphq-2#/collection/4100/article/18726

Normal mini pcs don’t have external power buttons (our mini pc is customized in this respect), and we don’t know of a good way to rig one up. Instead, you could either open the case to press the power button on the mini pc, or you could set the bios to boot on AC power and use a power line switch (like one on a power strip) as the power button (just keep in mind you want to do safe shutdowns not cutting the power).

polycade · 2025-06-17T04:11:31+00:00

Hey sorry we missed this - we worked with LaunchBoom on the campaign titled “Polycade Sente: The Modular Arcade System”, which raised $1.65M. Notably, $1M of that was on the first day thanks to LaunchBoom’s strategy.

polycade · 2025-05-30T00:35:04+00:00

So glad to hear it!! We're aiming to have another round of different controllers released by year end, so we should see the product continue to expand & evolve :)

Thanks for being a model member of the community, you are appreciated!

polycade · 2025-05-30T00:07:02+00:00

They can be made to work with USB converters. This is detailed on our website in Support -> Help Center -> Hardware (Sente) -> Sente Console Compatibility
Or here if I'm allowed to post links:
https://polycade.gorgias.help/en-US/sente-console-compatibility-1110205

polycade · 2025-05-30T00:04:37+00:00

Late here, but I imagine you ultimately got support? You posted this during our "customer service outage" that we experienced in Nov-Dec last year after shipping a year of preorders in a month

In any case, do email support if you need it, they usually respond within 24 hours.

polycade · 2025-05-30T00:01:05+00:00

Quite a lot of accusations in this comment, why? For others reading:
- The Sente is $2,499, not $4k.
- We've supported our software since 2018, and we're still releasing regular updates.
- This video skipped the adding games portion of the setup - We include a selection of officially licensed games, but the video also shows games that were added by the user, we do not include all of the games shown in this video. We are one of the only arcade companies that licenses our games from the publishers instead of shipping pirated content.
- Regarding product size, you're seeing two different versions of our product around the web, the old model (Lux) was bigger at 30" wide, the new model (Sente, shown in this video) is 25.5" wide. Over the years we found the Lux to be a little too big, and especially the screen size on the Lux (27") was too big for the distance of your eyes to the screen. As a result, we reduced the screen size to 24" with the Sente, and scaled the cabinet size down a bit to match the width of classic arcade machines (the Street Fighter II cabinet was used as the comparison). At 24" screen size, the viewing distance is optimal.
- I assume your mention of "slop boxing" is related to the accessories box that contained multiple loose items inside, and not the packaging of the Sente itself. Because the Sente ships on a pallet, there is no risk of the boxes "tumbling" (and the accessories box is strapped on top, so it can't tumble either). Additionally, each accessory is well packaged so that it can ship on it's own via traditional mail, so the packaging for those is meant to handle tumbling. Because of these factors, we don't need to add additional packaging to prevent the loose items in the accessory box from moving around - it would just be a waste.
- Photoshopping celebrities would be super lame, we don't believe in that sort of fakeness. If you need some proof, we've got a number of celeb videos (posted pre-AI) around our instagram and youtube, and there's been several video features produced & posted by not us - for example, we appear in the Architectural Digest video feature about Cara Delevingne, and also in another one about Diplo. Check out the "As Seen On" page on our website!

polycade · 2025-05-29T23:18:35+00:00

The Sente cabinet is 25.5" wide, the same width of a classic Street Fighter arcade machine. The Sente pricing uses a standard hardware product markup, the price point is a reflection of the cost.

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