The team behind Dolphin, a popular, long-running GameCube and Wii emulator, has announced that support for Triforce-based Arcade game compatibility has been added to the app.

If you haven't heard of the Triforce platform and only know it as an important artifact from The Legend of Zelda series, you probably aren't alone. Triforce is a GameCube-based arcade system developed in partnership with Nintendo, Namco, and Sega, featuring titles like Mario Kart Arcade GP, Mario Kart Arcade GP 2, F-Zero AX, and more. If you went to an arcade or movie theater in the mid-2000s, you probably saw at least one of these arcade cabinets. While not many good games were released on Triforce, the Mario Kart Arcade series is fondly remembered by many, including me.

Like most arcade platforms, Triforce is notoriously difficult to emulate due to its proprietary GD-ROMs and NAND cartridges, as well as arcade-specific issues related to multiplayer networking (the entire point of many of these titles is playing against another human).

Additionally, while Triforce is a unified Arcade platform at its core, each game has unique hardware built around it. In an extensive blog post about Triforce finally coming to the Dolphin (check it out, it really is interesting), the team behind the project outlined why it took so long to get the arcade games running smoothly on the emulator:

Because the Triforce has a significant amount of bespoke hardware, none of the developers reviewing the code knew much about how it worked. We were put into a tough spot of having to review a large volume of code that emulated unfamiliar devices. The Triforce was mostly a black box to us at the beginning of this effort, and it still is in many ways....

....The Triforce is ultimately a GameCube with arcade bits attached to it. Much like how Dolphin can automatically reconfigure itself depending on if you're booting a GameCube or Wii game, Dolphin will now become a Triforce when it detects a Triforce game being loaded. However, the Triforce Baseboard options can also be manually enabled for homebrew purposes, and there are some important settings in its configuration menus.

Nearly every Triforce title now runs on Dolphin

Even the Android version of the emulator supports the arcade titles now

Dolphin's team says it attempted to add Triforce titles to the emulator over 17 years ago, but ultimately removed the arcade platform in 2016 after no games booted because it didn't want to mislead users into thinking the arcade platform worked in the emulator. Efforts continued in a separate Triforce branch of Dolphin, with Mario Kart Arcade GP 1 and 2 eventually running through "brute force" emulation methods.

Fast-forward to last year, when developer Crediar reached out to the Dolphin team about merging his Triforce emulation code into a future main release of the emulator. The Dolphin team was impressed by Crediar's work, and with the release of Dolphin version 2512-395, the developer's Triforce code is now part of the emulator's core release. The team behind the Dolphin says developers Billiard and sepalani also offered significant help with getting Triforce running inside the emulator.

"This is the culmination of over a decade of work," writes Dolphin's development team in its blog post. According to the project's team, all Triforce-based arcade games now run smoothly in Dolphin, with The Key of Avalon the only exception (it lacks touchscreen support). Additionally, the team behind Dolphin was able to get multiplayer up and running with Mario Kart Arcade GP and Mario Kart Arcade GP 2.

Dolphin is available on a wide variety of platforms, including Windows, Linux, macOS, and Android. Only the PC and Android versions of the emulator currently support Triforce titles. It's likely that Nintendo arcade game compatibility with versions of Dolphin on other operating systems will arrive in the future.