Just when you think you know everything there is to know about an emulator, it throws a curveball and provides compatibility with a whole bunch of exciting arcade titles.
The Triforce Arcade Board has a lot of history surrounding it. A collaborative effort between Sega, Nintendo, and Namco in a bid to bring in a new wave of arcade classics after the rise of the home console, the Triforce brings together three gaming giants in the most Nintendo-themed way possible.
It's hard to believe that Sega and Nintendo would have teamed up back then considering their problems during the console wars, but the Triforce Board brings together the best minds from both companies and the added expertise from Namco's arcade team. It's essentially a GameCube motherboard with two Amusement Machine boards, a Baseboard and a Mediaboard, that make the GameCube capable of giving users a fully-fledged arcade experience. It might feel more like a Sega system with its Segaboot home menu equivalent, but at its core is my favourite indigo powerhouse, and that's a nice feeling for a Cube fan like me.
Virtua Striker 4, F-Zero AX, Mario Kart Arcade GP, Mobile Suit Gundam - they're all available to play on Dolphin now that support has finally been finished. Yes, finished - work began on bringing these games to Dolphin 17 years ago before the devs threw in the towel. It was removed to a separate branch of the emulator so work could continue, and after 10 years of work, it's finally ready for gamers to take advantage of and back as part of the main emulator.
Did you know that there was an arcade platform based on the GameCube? In this deep dive, we introduce our console step-sibling and show off all of its games!
— Dolphin Emulator (@dolphin@dolphin-emu.org) (@Dolphin_Emu) February 16, 2026
There's definitely nothing else.https://t.co/8XMjecMoq0
Who do we have to thank for this new addition? According to the main blog post on the Dolphin website, it's crediar who pushed them to include Triforce support on the emulator.
'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. Everything changed mid-2025 when crediar contacted us about potentially making a pull request to get his Triforce emulation code into our official builds. Developers had a mixture of both excitement and concern upon hearing about this. It would be a major project, and crediar's solo work would now be scrutinized by a bunch of people.
I always enjoy playing Mario Kart Arcade GP when I go down to my local gaming bar, but having the chance to play it through Dolphin means I can actually get to grips with the tracks beforehand and finally beat my friends on it. It's another big win for game preservation too, as these games won't hang around forever. At least now we can preserve them at home and show younger generations what we all used to do when we had the time and energy.
