Dolphin Emulator makes a breakthrough with support for TriForce games

When you think of “Nintendo games,” where do your thoughts immediately go? Consoles like the NES? Hands like a Switch? Both are solid answers, and both are probably more popular than “arcade games.” While arcades may not be Nintendo’s core business, the company has been around on and off since its early days. And now one of the most popular Nintendo characters in the world is getting a major upgrade that lets you relive some of Nintendo’s best arcade moments.

The early 2000s was a strange, revolutionary era for gaming. Sega’s struggles with the Dreamcast led the company out of the hardware business, and it quickly found itself turning to some unlikely partners to maintain a presence in the arcade. Those include Microsoft, which has Xbox-based Chihiro Arcade system titles like Crazy Taxi 3, and Sega’s long-time rival Nintendo. In fact, it was Sega, Nintendo, and Namco all teaming up for the TriForce arcade – basically, the arcade version of the GameCube.

While there weren’t a ton of TriForce games released in the end, that limited edition included a few entries from the popular series, including F-Zero AX and Mario Kart Arcade GP. Until now, if you ever wanted to play those games, that meant tracking down those arcade cabinets in real life.

Emulator fans probably already know about Dolphin, one of the best and most comprehensive. Dolphin targets the GameCube and Wii hardware, and offers enhancements such as glossy graphics output. In a blog post today, the Dolphin team describes some of the challenges they’ve faced over the years in expanding support for TriForce, finding mixed success and never fully utilizing their approach.

Well, that was then, but now the TriForce emulation has grown so much that Dolphin has reintegrated it into the emulator’s main codebase. Not only does that mean you can finally access these classic arcade titles from your PC, but they’re also already running on Android:

There are a few minor issues with usage as it stands today, such as the lack of on-screen buttons for Coin, Test, and Service – but you can still deposit coins with a touch: Just shake your phone. There are a few other hard-coded bits that you can’t change in the UI on Android, but we expect to see those improvements over time.

Perhaps most impressively, at the last second the Dolphin team was able to activate the network. These cabinets are built to support many cabinet games, and after solving many problems, the simulation has started working properly. The team promises that a full guide to setting up multi-cabinet simulation is in the works — we can’t wait to try it ourselves!