The Ultimate Home Arcade With Polycade's Tyler Bushnell  ## Metadata - Author: [[Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman]] - Full Title: The Ultimate Home Arcade With Polycade's Tyler Bushnell - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/aa408e01-29dc-4b9d-af9a-2d24511f7436 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Early Kickstarter Fan Testimony** - Scott bought a Polycade during the Kickstarter and hung it on his wall with his son. - He calls it gorgeous and says it fits both home and commercial spaces. Transcript: Scott Hanselman Very, very well. I think it's funny because it's going to look like if people see this on video, like it's an ad for Polycade because there is an arcade Polycade behind me. I've got the black one that is mounted on my wall. Hopefully, people who see tiktok or youtube will be able to see that as well so here we are two guys that work for polycade uh just to make sure that folks are clear i am a customer this is Tyler Bushnell Not sponsored i'm just a super fan nice nice well thank you for that scott i appreciate the support from uh the sort of early. Scott Hanselman Yeah, well, the early adopters, right? So I got it during a Kickstarter. And a lot of people are down on Kickstarter because they feel like they, maybe a Kickstarter didn't deliver. But man, oh man, Polycade delivered. Was that an overwhelming experience? Tyler Bushnell Yeah, I mean, like, you know, we've run a few Kickstarters at this point. It is funny, like, always folks that are like, oh, this like Kickstarters make me nervous. And like, will this ever ship? And like all of that. I mean, granted, we are like aggressive with our delivery estimates. So we're, we're working on adding ([Time 0:01:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4d131381-4155-42b5-9d87-139fe8777be0)) - **Design For Both Players And Tinkerers** - Polycade balances plug-and-play simplicity with mod-friendly hardware design. - Controllers use common connectors and include studs for easy modifications. Transcript: Tyler Bushnell Games yes ish we add like a thread of that tinkering in there um just by like using a lot of like off-the components and like common connectors and stuff. So like, you know, where we see the tinkering coming in on, on the pole, I mean, you're right. It is like, we take, we take a dual approach basically. Like, how, how can we set this up so that it's like super easy for the person that just wants it to work. Right. Um, so that's like step one. And then for the people that want to like kind of pull back the hood and like get in there and like mess around we want to make sure they are like empowered to do that right so like we put like Extra studs on the undersides of the controllers like all of them right so that you can go in and like mod the controller right so like our um button mash controller is the one that's just Buttons right and it's like for your original like um asteroids tube and gravatar setup um but it's also like would make a great spinner controller just given the layout of the buttons And everything so the center hole has a stud pattern under there so that you could install a joystick or a spinner or something else if you should so desire well i think that that speaks Scott Hanselman To the word i would use is intentionality when i got this it showed up's massive. It shows up in my front yard in a giant box, very well packaged. My son and I, my 15-year at the time, installed it, hung it on the wall. It's absolutely gorgeous. It could be in a bar or a club or a restaurant. Like if you have a commercial installation, you can buy it, put it up there, and it'll look amazing. You're intentional about the tinkering. I didn't even know that, that it was as modular as it was like, like behind you on, on your wall are all of your modular controllers. They just show up in software as X input. ([Time 0:04:05](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5abc0ce1-b0ce-4d4f-8d70-a2bb16dcc70c)) - **Use XInput For Broad Game Compatibility** - Choose XInput for controller compatibility with modern games and predictable button mapping. - Avoid keyboard or DInput controllers if you want fewer manual mappings and broad game support. Transcript: Tyler Bushnell Absolutely yeah the controller protocol has been like one of the foundational like hardware choices on our our platform um and it's one of the reasons you know i mean when you're building An arcade machine you basically have three choices of controller protocol. It's either a keyboard controller, a D input controller, or an X input controller. On the market, X input controllers are the most rare. They're becoming a little more common now, but definitely when we started, you almost couldn't find one. And the difference between the three is uh is is quite a bit so like keyboard controllers have the advantage that they have a ton of buttons so you can like map like a whole like you know What i call a franken panel where like it's got like you know four players and every controller under the sun right the big teenage min mutant ninja turtle one it's got yeah yeah four time With 24 buttons 50 you know 32 buttons yeah so you can map like everything to a keyboard controller because there's so many inputs um but the problem with the keyboard controller is that Because of that you they're generally like unstandardized and so you're going to end up mapping the controls for every single game that you install manually, right? Giant pain. And then take it one step further. If you intend to play any modern games on this, you know, again, a keyboard is unstandardized. And so, you know, some games are going to map the movement to the arrow keys. Other games are going to map it to WASD. And so there's no standard here. So when you wire your hardware, you're just making a random choice, and not all the games are going to adhere to that. The same kind of goes for D input. It's also relatively unstandardized, like controller protocol. This is what PlayStation and stuff uses. And it's also harder to program for as a game developer. So it's an older protocol than X input. So most game developers don't code for D input anymore. And the ones that do, usually you have to do like manual mapping again, because it's pretty unstandardized. X input exists in almost every modern game today. Some games only work with X input, right? They don't allow any controller mapping and it just like it made it work with Xbox controllers and that's it um and so we went x input because it's standardized everyone agrees on like What the like directional buttons are what the like main button is what the secondary button is you know main and the concept of main and secondary is important because you want select And back to always kind of be the same um but so yeah so that's why we went x input uh it just works out of the box with nearly everything emulators are highly mappable so like you don't have To like bend hardware to emulators um so yeah, long, long, long story, long, long answer. ([Time 0:06:23](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e7c3bea0-7896-493d-8f6a-52e0448ea571)) - **Licensed Store Plus Curated Indies** - Polycade provides a licensed game store to avoid legal gray areas of ROMs. - They also curate modern indie titles that fit the arcade experience. Transcript: Scott Hanselman Let's talk about that so ags means arcade gaming software so that's the kiosk that's the front end now historically and we should probably mention this as well there's been questionable Legality about the idea of emulating arcades. But with Polycade, there's an actual shop and I can go and purchase games. If I don't want to be scouring the internet for ROMs of questionable provenance, I can just go and pay $2.99 and I can play a licensed game. So you've solved that problem for folks that don't want to go all over the internet and look for stuff that might be in a gray area yeah totally and so like you know our our game store is really Tyler Bushnell About like getting like surfacing the the retro titles that um you know you can't really buy anywhere right now um and then also um curating like modern indie titles that really fit this Scott Hanselman Like sort of arcade itch.io integration you have gog integration like my steam games just lit up and there's a lot of really great almost a resurgence of great games on steam like i got A bunch of great japanese shmups shoot-em and vertical games that i couldn't find anywhere. Couldn't get the ROMs working. And I could go and say, oh, there is on Steam. Five bucks. Tyler Bushnell Totally, totally. Yeah. And then like other games like, you know, vampire survivors that have sort of come with these new mechanics that, you know, it looks and feels like a game that was released back in the 80s. ([Time 0:12:08](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b0133521-6045-4a7a-bd2f-1c915ade8f26)) - **Design Driven By Living Rooms, Not Arcades** - Tyler designed Polycade to be living-room friendly and avoid CRT maintenance. - He prioritized modern features and a 16:9 display to support current games and UI expectations. Transcript: Tyler Bushnell So i mean you know we started like interested in retro games like built up a unit you know i mean i wanted to put the machine in my living room so like that's what informed the design of where Like my wife is an interior designer furniture designer and so she you know it had to look a certain way to appease her so that that's sort of what informed the design but from a functional Standpoint once we started scratch scratching the surface on like modern one thing we knew going into this because i grew up with arcade machines we moved a few times and like bringing An arcade machine up and down the stairs is something no one should ever have to do oh no it's the worst miserable yeah and so like much less six of them um it took three full-grown men with Scott Hanselman Bad backs to get that arcade out the door uh and i never like i never want to do that ever again yeah yeah exactly yeah and so like when we talk about crts i knew immediately also from a just Tyler Bushnell A supply and everything else perspective like crts are not a logical thing to use anymore, right? Like if you're a purist, you're doing a museum thing, like whatever, I don't know, you're like, yeah, get your CRT, whatever. No one's starting a business about CRT arcade machines. But more importantly, we wanted this to be a modern device, right? We wanted it to have modern features, like modern software features and whatnot right like i've played plenty of main cabinets and like you know set up my own raspberry pi console system And the first thing that like the thing that was so interesting to me when you set up your like raspberry pi retro console is that for me yeah fun to set it up and then once i got it all set up Right i like turned it on i played like three games and i never touched the thing again you know and it was like why is that like what is this that like makes this thing suck kind of you know And it's like i don't know what it was like some amount of like turning the tv on and getting the pie up and running and like you know emulation station doesn't remember any of the games I've played so like it's like i don't know the ui just is like very un welcoming welcoming yeah. It's just kind of a bummer and it takes a while to find what you want to play. It doesn't really like... You're sifting... Of course, you loaded 10,000 games in there, so you're sifting through Sesame Street. And some of them work and some of them don't. Yeah, yeah. And so it's like the whole thing is just kind of a pain and doesn't really... Something not engaging about it. And it's's like it's like a problem with software it's a problem with like barrier to entry it's a problem with I don't know so it was like coming back to the polycade we you know wanted To make sure we were building something that like felt good to play um and was sort of future proof in a way that um it could be the most flexible machine possible right and so when we talk About being the most flexible and being able to play modern games modern games are built for one screen size, and that is 1920 by, you know, I mean, it's like a 16 to 9 screen ratio. And a lot of them don't play well when you bring them up on like a screen size. Sometimes for those, it doesn't translate very well to a 4 by 3 because you just don't really have to do that very often these days yeah well and plus you can apply crt filters like crt filters Scott Hanselman Were okay five years ago yeah but on a modern machine on a 4k monitor they're extraordinary so if you want to spend that little bit of 3d uh you know power on your gpu why not do it it's pretty Tyler Bushnell Convincing yeah and and and when it comes to like emulation and like retro technologies right like those are always being moved forward to modern hardware right and so yeah we can expect That like crt, like, you know, scan lines and all that good stuff is going to be properly emulated on a modern monitor. We can also expect that emulators are going to allow us to like keep screen size ratios proper on a 16 by 9 monitor. ([Time 0:21:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f4a45c69-f574-4d84-b968-5797e112cdbe)) - **Camera As A Platform For Features** - Built-in webcam aims at future features like streaming, photo apps, and facial logins. - Camera features can simplify family profiles and automate score attribution. Transcript: Tyler Bushnell Then and and everything is every all the old stuff is like forwards compatible right so it's like but you also put a webcam in the thing which surprised me there's a webcam at the top why Yeah so that's you know originally we wanted there for like people to be streaming or like you know doing that kind of thing um you know for commercial use cases or i mean for anybody there's Like a photo booth app in in our software so you can you know do that at the very very basic um a lot of the like choice to put the webcam in there is like future looking like we really want to Add a bunch of camera features in there on the software side um we just haven't really gotten there yet um but definitely think that like i mean there's a lot of fun stuff you can do with The camera, right? Like, um, we could add in like facial recognition logins. Sure. Um, so, you know, a family scenario where like, you don't have to log in and little kid gets the little kid menu or whatever. Yeah. And like, and you're exactly right. We know who's there so we can adjust the game library appropriately. We can, you know, know who, which account to put the score under, you know, even when you're playing hot seat. Things like that could, you know, there's just some fun stuff that you can start to do with a camera, you know, um, in addition to like, you know, I'd love to, we really want to do like some Just fun camera filters where you can go in and like, you know, take a picture where you're like, I don't know, Rambo or something. ([Time 0:27:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/177ab66e-d186-4fb5-8874-4dee46c9082e)) - **Light Guns And Magnetic Holsters Work Well** - Polycade supports third-party light guns like Sinden and integrates magnet holsters that click on securely. - Scott describes calibrating frames to improve gun tracking and enjoying recoil-enabled titles. Transcript: Tyler Bushnell Totally yeah yeah yeah they're they're they're great and the the guns are i mean they are a little bit of a pain to get running but um once you do they're the most fun right yeah once you get Scott Hanselman The calibration i ended up putting a a light yellow frame some people put a a a white frame basically a pixel frame around to make it clear to the gun that this is the thing that we're going To be shooting at and then you're playing like zombie games and time crisis and stuff like that and there's even one uh with recoil so it'll go and go each time yeah i mean it's it's about As close to going to chucky cheese and playing terminator or jurassic park that you can possibly get and the integration again to your credit i just got the holsters they just magnet On and they magnet on securely like i thought i was gonna have to screw this thing on and drill a hole in the metal they just popped on they're fierce the the we were stoked when we got those Tyler Bushnell Right because the first prototype was like way too weak and we were like, oh, this better work. Scott Hanselman Oh, no. Like, I don't know what you did, but like, you don't want it to be so magnetic that they're never coming off. But you also don't want them sliding around. Whatever you did, you nailed it because I put them on and it's so satisfying. Yeah, yeah. Thunk. ([Time 0:30:18](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b6c577aa-46d1-471f-a6e8-38134b941cdf)) - **Mount Third-Party Controllers Easily** - Use Polycade's modular mounts to attach specialty controllers like steering wheels and four-player panels. - Buy compatible third-party wheels and swap controllers quickly with the magnetic mounts. Transcript: Tyler Bushnell Yeah the driving wheel uh it's i mean we're still working on the driving wheel i need to play outrun with the driving wheel yeah now keep in mind uh because we get this question a lot, but The driving wheel controller will be a universal mounting controller. Oh, interesting. It will work with PXN and Logitech driving wheels. So we are not providing the driving wheel. You get to choose your own. Oh, nice. Scott Hanselman So you're giving us a mount and it's worth noting you really got to go to polycade.com and look at that opening animation because it is truly impressive the way that you can pull these Controllers out and make it look like whatever you want so i'm going to pull this controller out unplug the usba out of the back pop in the mount and then put on my logitech my g i forgot the Tyler Bushnell Number for it but the you know my ferrari logitech controller or whatever and it's just going to work yes yes exactly yeah yeah so good so um yeah so the driving wheel that's that's being Worked on um and then the we should see pretty soon here a prototype of the four-player controller oh how will that work? Scott Hanselman Because this is a, like, I'd love to play Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or The Simpsons. Is it going to be cramped? How are we going to fit four players in such a small area? Tyler Bushnell It will be, it will hang over the sides. Scott Hanselman Oh, so it'll feel like it really did. It'll have that flair. Like a larger deck, yeah, yeah. Oh, this is, is it one giant one or is it two? It's one giant one. Oh, this is going to be great. Tyler Bushnell Yeah. Scott Hanselman It's going to be heavy. I'd love that. That's okay. But the point is you have choice. Like again, if people are on the video or they look at this on TikTok or YouTube behind you are actually not just the controllers hanging on your wall, but you even sell wall hangers. So it is expected. ([Time 0:32:08](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8862ebc1-b6fe-401d-9669-cfd0af8c4478))