Sharing your build with Arcade Punks

Made a build you are proud of? Found a great one that deserves a wider audience? Arcade Punks is built on the community sharing its work, and we would love to see it. Here is how it works and what to send.

What we do for you

• A proper article on the site with your description, video and credits.
• Full distribution: we get it out on public torrents, Usenet and other file-sharing platforms, with our seedboxes keeping fresh releases fast for the first 90 days.
• Your bandwidth saved: you upload once, and we mirror it everywhere.
• Free: we never charge creators to release.

Step by step

1. Get in touch. Use the contact page (choose “Advertising & Publishing”) or message us on our Discord. Tell us what the build is and roughly how big it is.
2. Get your upload details. We will send you FTP login details for our private server. We no longer accept Google Drive or OneDrive links, as they take too long to handle and are often unreliable.
3. Pack and upload it. Split it into 900 MB RAR parts, make an SFV checksum file, and upload. The full walkthrough is in Uploading to our FTP.
4. Send us the details for the article (see the list below).
5. Keep your files until we confirm everything checked out and extracted cleanly. Then allow a few days for us to verify it and get it onto our servers, seedboxes and Usenet.

What to include

The more you tell us, the better the article and the fewer questions people ask you later.

• Build name and version.
• Device it is made for: Raspberry Pi 4 or 5, PC, Steam Deck, a particular handheld, and so on. Say if it will not work on similar devices.
• Front end and base: Batocera, RetroBat, CoinOPS, RetroFE, Attract Mode, HyperSpin, LaunchBox and so on, with the version.
• Size, and the card or drive it was made on. Images are an exact copy of the card they came from, so a “512GB” build made on a roomy card may not fit someone else’s 512GB card. Telling people which card you used saves a lot of grief (see Image won’t fit).
• What is in it: systems included, themes, any special features.
• Setup notes: controllers it is set up for, hotkeys, anything that needs changing on first boot, and which systems need the player to supply their own BIOS files.
• Known issues: anything that does not work yet. Honesty here saves a flood of comments.
• Credits: who made it, plus anyone whose themes or work you built on.
• A video: a YouTube link showing it running goes a long way.

Sharing someone else’s build

Spotted something great elsewhere, or have a Mega, NZB or torrent you think we should share? Send it over the same way and we will look at getting a proper article out for it. Credit the original builder in what you send us.

One favour when sharing on other sites

Please do not post our direct download or torrent links around the web. Share the article link instead. It supports the site, keeps all the info and updates in one place, and helps us keep everything free.

Thinking of an exclusive?

If you have something special and want Arcade Punks to be the first and only place it lands, read Releasing your build exclusively with us.

Still stuck? See Uploading to our FTP, or ask us on our Discord.