The developers of the popular GameCube & Wii emulator, Dolphin, have announced in a new blog update that support has recently been implemented for Triforce-based games; that is, games based on the GameCube-based arcade system created in 2002, developed as part of a joint venture between Namco, Nintendo, and Sega.
Triforce is the technology used across arcade games like Mario Kart Arcade GP, Mario Kart Arcade GP 2, and F-Zero AX, and was even once set to power its very own Star Fox title, making it the subject of interest and curiosity for a lot of dedicated Nintendo fans.
However, in the past, it has historically been rather tricky to emulate, thanks to the various quirks of the platform and the titles released for it; from its use of multiple formats (proprietary GD-ROMs and NAND-cartridges) for video game storage and the presence of multiple I/O formats (Sega JVS Type 1 and Sega JVS Type 3), to arcade-specific networking problems. Or as Dolphin's developers more succinctly put it, "Even though each game is powered by a Triforce, all of the hardware around it can be unique for each game and even behave differently on different revisions of the same game!"
Despite facing an incredible mountain to climb, over 17 years ago, efforts were reportedly made to emulate parts of the Triforce Baseboard in Dolphin's mainline releases, but no games booted, and it was eventually left to languish before being removed entirely in the summer of 2016. As a result, efforts were then moved to a separate dedicated Triforce branch, which ended up having some limited success through "brute force" in emulating games, like Mario Kart Arcade GP 1 and 2.
From there, it was pretty much decided to keep these efforts separate until last year, when a developer called crediar got in touch with the Dolphin team about merging his own Triforce emulation code into a future official build. Unlike the "hacky, messy Triforce emulation" of old, this ended up impressing the Dolphi devs, and as of Dolphin 2512-395 is now available in the main branch once again, with individuals like Billiard and sepalani helping to get it ready for action.
"This is the culmination of over a decade of work," Dolphin's developer stated in the update, "While we were focused on advancing GameCube and Wii emulation, crediar doubled down and continued maintaining his own fork specifically for Triforce emulation. We were aware of this fork, but given the fact that we knew little about how the Triforce worked and had bad memories of the old, hacky Triforce branch, it mostly flew under our radar."
According to the devs, all but The Key of Avalon games (which are missing touchscreen support) are now playable, with this update even including Android support. There have also been some breakthroughs with multi-cab arcade multiplayer, too, with both Mario Kart Arcade GP and Mario Kart Arcade GP 2 now working well, after some "11th-hour" meddling.
You can read the full update here.