Triforce (Arcade Board)

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The Triforce Arcade Board was a joint creation by Nintendo, Sega, and Namco. The name is a reference the three companies working together and to the famous triforce symbol from Nintendo's own Zelda franchise. The hardware is very similar to the GameCube with a few enhancements. Some of the more noteworthy games include F-Zero AX from Sega and Mario Kart Arcade GP from Namco
Overview
The Triforce is an arcade system board developed jointly by Namco, Sega, and Nintendo, with the first games appearing in 2002. The name "Triforce" is a reference to Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda series of games, and symbolized the three companies' involvement in the project. The system hardware is based on the GameCube with several differences, like provisions for add-ons such as Sega's GD-ROM system and upgradeable RAM modules.
The Triforce was initially believed to have twice as much 1T-SRAM as the GameCube (48MB instead of 24MB), but this was disproven by a teardown analysis of a Triforce board.
A few versions of the Triforce exist. The first two are the Type-1 and Type-3 units, the former using an external DIMM board (same as used on the Naomi and Naomi 2) while the latter integrates this component inside the metal casing. A custom Namco version exists which only accepts custom NAND Flash based cartridges, which has a different Media board and supposedly different baseboard. These boards use the same metal case design as the Type-3 Triforce.
Triforce specifications
* Main CPU: IBM PowerPC "Gekko" @ 486 MHz
* Graphics: Custom ATI/Nintendo "Flipper" @ 162 MHz.
* Color: 24-bit color (24-bit z-buffer)
* Hardware features: Fog, subpixel anti-aliasing, 8 hardware lights, alpha blending, virtual texture design, multi-texturing, bump mapping, environment mapping, mipmapping, bilinear filtering, trilinear filtering, anisotropic filtering, real-time hardware texture decompression (S3TC), real-time decompression of display list, embedded framebuffer, 1 MB embedded texture cache, 3-line deflickering filter.
* Sound DSP: Custom Macronix 16-bit DSP @ 81 MHz
* Main RAM: Main memory 24 MB of MoSys 1T-SRAM, approximately 10 ns sustainable latency.
Porting
In 2012, a homebrew application was released for the Wii that enabled this GameCube-derived console to run Mario Kart Arcade GP, Mario Kart Arcade GP 2, F-Zero AX and Virtua Striker 4 Ver.2006 (see the list of games below). The coder stated that support for other games and additional features are possible.

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See Also

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