Decades ago, Nintendo embarked upon a once-unthinkable partnership with Sega and Namco to bring a new arcade platform to life – one powered by the GameCube. That platform, known as Triforce, would host a number of unique games, including a pair of original Mario Kart titles. For years, those games have largely been inaccessible, but that's finally changing thanks to the excellent Wii and GameCube emulator, Dolphin.
I have vague memories of seeing Triforce arcade games referenced in the pages of Nintendo Power, but I never saw any of the machines in person, and that's true for most gamers outside of Japan. The platform's most notable legacy is probably Sega's F-Zero AX, licensing Nintendo's futuristic racing series for an ultra-hard modern arcade game, which would eventually be ported back home in somewhat altered form as F-Zero GX.
But there are other Triforce games that never really lived outside the arcade. Those titles include Mario Kart Arcade GP and its sequel, which were based on the Mario Kart: Double Dash engine but offered new tracks, new characters, and a new handling model. Developer Namco even added new characters to the roster, including Pac-Man and a Tamagotchi.
While you once would've had to track down a well-equipped arcade to play any of the Triforce titles, support is now being integrated into the Dolphin emulator. As the devs behind Dolphin explain in a lengthy blog post, getting Triforce games up and running was quite an arduous process, despite the fact that it's "ultimately a GameCube with arcade bits attached to it."
"Over 17 years ago, Dolphin gained the ability to emulate parts of the Triforce Baseboard," the devs explain. "It wasn't enough to boot any Triforce games, but it was a start. However, that was the last time anything Triforce-related hit our mainline builds. Aside from code clean up efforts, the fledgling Baseboard emulation was left untouched until it was removed in the summer of 2016 to avoid misleading users into thinking that mainline Dolphin targeted Triforce hardware."
A separate branch of Dolphin targeting Triforce emulation entered development, but while it made some progress – the Mario Kart Arcade GP games were technically made playable, albeit in fairly broken states – that project ultimately "stalled out."
"This is the culmination of over a decade of work," the devs say of the new release, offering credit to another developer known as crediar, who "doubled down and continued maintaining his own fork specifically for Triforce emulation."
With "the fact that we knew little about how the Triforce worked and had bad memories of the old, hacky Triforce branch," crediar's work "mostly flew under our radar," until mid-2025. That's when crediar contacted the central Dolphin devs about integrating Triforce support into the main branch of the emulator. The devs say they were won over by "the quality of the emulation."
"Suddenly being thrust into Triforce emulation after all of these years was quite the experience for everyone involved," the devs conclude. "We can confidently say that this esoteric hardware is full of surprises. Just emulating these games and trying to test them was a distinct challenge far removed from anything we experienced with the GameCube and Wii! Each game has so many unique quirks, revisions, and sometimes even hardware configurations!"
Now, however, Triforce games finally have a second chance, and the preservation effort that every obscure corner of video game history deserves. "Maybe a few dozen years later than anyone expected," the Dolphin devs acknowledge, but at least we got here in the end.
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