Rise of the Triforce

Hacker News · Feb 16, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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During the rapid technological advancements of the early 1990s, the video game industry was on the cusp of a massive addition - another dimension. With console shenanigans like the Super FX chip giving players a taste of 3D, hype was at an all-time high. But the games released for home consoles were nothing compared to what arcade developers were capable of doing. By employing gigantic budgets and cutting-edge hardware, the arcade gave players a chance to see the future, today. But the future eventually arrived with the launch of the 5th generation of consoles. All of a sudden, the revolutionary 3D hardware features that were once exclusive to arcades were now available in home consoles. Without next-generation hype pushing players into the arcade, powerful but expensive arcade machines were no longer sustainable to develop. The industry adjusted by moving toward more cost effective solutions, with many turning to the inexpensive, already proven 3D-capable hardware available in 5th gen home consoles. Rather than turning around the decline of the arcade, the cheaper hardware may have helped accelerate it. There were fewer unique experiences to pull players into the arcade, and previous hit exclusives were now seeing high quality home console ports that allowed them to be enjoyed without munching quarters. When the 6th generation arrived with the Dreamcast and the PlayStation 2, many arcade stalwarts waved the white flag and started to shift their arcade divisions to home console projects, with mixed success. Sega was among those hit hardest by this era. They produced some of the greatest arcade thrills of the 1990s and enjoyed massive success in the home console market with the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive. But a string of mistakes and miscalculations combined with the slumping arcade industry sent them to the brink of bankruptcy. By 2002, the Dreamcast had been soundly defeated by the launch of the PlayStation 2, and Sega began porting some of their hits to their former rivals' hardware just to stay afloat. The home market was lost, but the languishing arcade scene presented Sega with an opportunity. They still had legendary arcade development teams, and if Sega could leverage them to produce a wave of arcade hits, they would be in a position to dominate a new era of arcades when most others were changing gears. There was just one problem: Sega didn't have the resources that they once did. If they were going to do this, they needed some help. And so they did something that would have been considered unthinkable just five years prior. Sega teamed up with Nintendo to develop a GameCube-based arcade platform. Bolstering their ranks was Namco, another coin-op stalwart with tons of arcade veterans. Three companies, one mission: Triforce. The Triforce IPL (Initial Program Loader).Click/tap to Play. File has audio. Triforce Hardware¶ While Triforce was a collaboration project, it still feels like a very Sega coded arcade system. It can even use certain NAOMI style components! Along with the Xbox-based Chihiro, the Triforce is sometimes considered a successor to the NAOMI 2. Inside of this metal shell is... a GameCube! Quite literally, actually. The Triforce hardware is built around a stock GameCube motherboard, with two Triforce-specific boards attached to it: the AM-Baseboard and AM-Mediaboard. The AM (Amusement Machine) boards are the secret sauce of the Triforce and transform the stock GameCube into something capable of producing arcade experiences. The early boot process is the same as a retail console, but a modified GameCube IPL (sometimes referred to as the GameCube BIOS) is used to initialize the Triforce hardware and load the Triforce equivalent of a "home menu", Segaboot. Segaboot is a special disc image on the Mediaboard that can be loaded by the Triforce at will through special commands. It is responsible for loading the actual game and for providing the Service Menu, where the operator can run hardware tests and change settings on the machine. By using Picoboot to override the boot process, it is possible to load a standard GameCube IPL or homebrew like Swiss. And since all of the pins are still on the mainboard, we can also connect a standard GameCube front panel and even load full GameCube games from microSD over Serial Port 2! The Baseboard is primarily responsible for input and output. It handles translation between JVS I/O devices (more on those later) and the GameCube's SI bus. It also takes the GameCube's digital video output and feeds it to two VGA ports on the back of the main unit. The Mediaboard's most important responsiblity is storing and serving the game software to the GameCube. It is also used to handle other tasks, such as networking, through special commands. The Triforce Baseboard was mostly unchanged throughout the Triforce's lifespan, but the Mediaboard could vary depending on the developer, game, and when the game was released. In fact, games weren't guaranteed to even come out on the same storage medium! Format Wars¶ A spinning disc and active laser were not normally considered reliable enough for an arcade environment. These machines will be on all day, every day for years, and players were often rough on machines that they didn't own. So, the Triforce eschews the standard GameCube mini-DVD alike format for its own storage solutions. Most games were designed for the DIMM (Dual In-line Memory Module) variant of the Triforce, where game data is shipped on GD-ROM and loaded into RAM on the first boot. GD (Gigabyte Disc) was a format initially devised by Sega and Yamaha for use in the Dreamcast. By increasing the data density of ordinary compact disc technology, the 12cm GD-ROM had somewhat comparable capacity to the GameCube's DVD-based 8cm disc (1GiB versus 1.46GiB). Were GD-ROM drives more reliable than early DVD drives? Maybe! By this point, GD-ROM was an established technology that Sega was already using in arcades for years. Perhaps even more importantly, it was cheaper. Sega designed it so they could even reuse GD-ROM drives designed for their other arcade platforms, since they used a generic SCSI-style connector. DIMM variant Triforces came with stickers advertising the amount of DIMM RAM on the Mediaboard. These stickers caused some confusion in the enthusiast community, as people would often mistake the amount listed as the total RAM accessible to the game. In reality, the DIMM RAM was mostly intended for use as a read-only RAM drive, rather than for general purpose use. As previously mentioned, the Triforce hardware is based around a stock GameCube motherboard, so games can only access the same 24+16 MiB of RAM that a retail GameCube uses. Once the game was loaded into memory, it was intended to stay there. And thanks to a battery backup that maintained the data even in the event of a power failure, the GD-ROM may only be needed once in the entire lifetime of the machine. This was their secret toward making the Triforce GD-ROM drive reliable for the arcade. One of the main exceptions would be if a new disc were inserted. Many Triforce games saw updates, which could be shipped on new GD-ROMs. Namco's Triforce games ditched the GD-ROM and DIMM RAM and instead used 512MB NAND cartridges to store game data. The NAND retains its contents even if the system loses power and the backup battery runs dry, which eliminates the need for GD-ROMs. These games also saw updates through SD card or over the internet, with updates able to directly modify the NAND contents. Both methods of storing Triforce game data have the same goal in the end: deliver a disc image to the internal GameCube. In addition to the GD-ROM or NAND cartridge, each game also has a corresponding security key that must be inserted into the Triforce unit in order for the game to run. Type 1, Type 3, and Saving in Arcades¶ There are two variants of Triforce I/O: Type 1 and Type 3. These refer to the Sega JVS Type 1 and Sega JVS Type 3. JVS stands for JAMMA Video Standard, a common standard created by a group of Japanese game companies for connecting various accessories and controllers to arcade systems. It's easiest to think of JVS I/O as the arcade equivalent to USB. Other Sega JVS I/O compatible devices can work with the Triforce even if they were originally designed for other arcade platforms, but it's up to the game developers to actually add support for a particular piece of hardware. Type 3 Triforces also have the capability to support more complicated analog input devices. Whether it was Type 1 or Type 3, Sega had a trick that was instrumental to their efforts to revive the arcade scene and almost every Triforce game would use it. It was a revolutionary idea that had taken hold in the home console market but was still rare to see in arcades: saving and continuing. By using cheap cards that could hold a small amount of data, players could buy what amounted to a small memory card directly from the arcade machine using a built-in vendor. These cards could be bought for as cheap as a single credit in some cases, and had enough storage to save progress, preferences, and other unlocks. Because the data wasn't locked to the machine, these cards allowed the player to continue their progress from any arcade that had the game and a working card slot. The end goal of this was to get players more invested in arcade experiences by having them progress and unlock content. Some Triforce games are full of so many unlockables that it'd be impossible to see everything in a single session at the arcade. Triforce games can support two types of cards for saving: Magnetic Cards (magcards) and Integrated Circuit (IC) cards. Magcards are cheaper, fragile, and can only survive so many writes before failing. They have the added bonus of having a printable side, where the game can print a player's achievements and more. IC cards are more like old credit cards with a thicker plastic. They weren't printable, but were much sturdier. A limit of 50