Rise of the Triforce

[rtpg]

To anyone who has an opportunity I highly recommend taking any chance you get to try and play any of the bigger "moving" arcade machines like the AX Monster Ride shown in the video.

Even for really old stuff like Space Harrier the feeling of moving along with the screen gives you a more visceral experience than almost any VR setup. Hard to fake the effects of gravity!

[0] has a list (in japanese) of moving arcade machines. Mikado in Takadanobaba has some of these. These things are getting older and older of course so the window of opportunity is unfortunately shrinking as time goes on.

(EDIT: just realised that list itself is over 10 years old at this point so YMMV)

[0]: https://www.space-harrier.com/arcade.html

[jonplackett]

This is where arcade machines should have all gone. More interesting experiences with hardware that are really difficult to replicate at scale.

The best arcade games sell did this - it doesn’t take much - like the pedal for time crisis. Sure you _can_ buy one at home but most people don’t and even then it’s a crap placid pedal.

[kgwxd]

A friend of mine had the moving After Burner machine. Thing was dangerous as hell, could easily break a bone or sever a finger, but soooo cool.

[pezezin]

Yes, that list is quite old and lists some games that are not available anymore, while missing some others like the retro floor of Gigo 3 in Akihabara.

Anyway, Mikado in Ikebukuro has the standard F-Zero AX cabinet, and it is great. I have never visited their game center in Takadanobaba though, it is still in my TODO list...

[raverbashing]

Thanks though last time I tried that it gave me the mother of all motion sicknesses

[BHSPitMonkey]

I'm always left in awe by not only the Dolphin team's work, but the quality of their articles and release notes. This was no exception!

[larodi]

Incredible the pace gaming companies in Japan did innovate with chips and boards and everything during this era. While PCs were following a somewhat slow pace, guys at SEGA, Nintendo, Namco, Capcom and similar were literally making innovation by the hour, and commercializing it. A lot to learn from their stories.

[Leynos]

Sadly, like everything, the arcades are now commodity hardware. Everyone just started putting out industrial PC based systems and shipping the games on hard drives

[PlatoIsADisease]

Wild to see how far they've fallen. Although I think this was basically the turning point for Nintendo. The GC intentionally avoided competing(at least on graphics) and was still a financial success.

From there, Nintendo relied on gimmicks and corporate mascots/IP.

I guess sega was a few years ahead of them on their own timeline.

[stackghost]

The Gamecube aspect is particularly poignant to me. Splayed across my workbench right this very moment is a Gamecube that has a failing optical drive. I am currently trying to resurrect it with a RP2350 so I can load roms from an SD card.

It was a pretty great console, in its own way.

[pezezin]

I recently restored my old GameCube. Back in the day I installed a ViperGC (the first modchip for the GameCube) to play "backups", but the optical drive has died.

But thanks to the community, after reflashing it with Gekkoboot it can load Swiss from a SP2SD2, and from there load ROMs from the SD card! Reflashing the modchip was a pain in the ass though, the programmer required a parallel port and the software only runs on Windows XP, but in the end it worked and I am pretty happy with the results.

[krs_]

Not that you shouldn't put a picoboot or whatever in there anyway, but it's getting increasingly common for the caps on the drive board to fail at this point, causing the disc drive to fail.

[bigstrat2003]

I have seen Mario Kart arcade cabinets, but had no idea about the history behind them. Thanks to the Dolphin team for a great article, and hats off on the emulation work!

[jldugger]

Thats a long article for what amounts to "Dolphin now supports F-Zero AX" =)

Must have taken a heckin' amount of work!

[throwaway27448]

What does "heckin" mean? I associate it with redditors' impersonation of dogs and I was surprised to see it here.

[snthpy]

I was expecting this to be about The Legend of Zelda.

[seanhunter]

Windwaker. Such a fantastic game. That is the first video game where I literally had to stop because I never wanted the experience to end. So my windwaker save is there for me, just before the credits whenever I want to go back.

[pragma_x]

What I think is truly amazing is how truly rare it is to see a home console move into an arcade platform, instead of the other way around. Almost always, the home system was derived from lessons learned from more expensive, rugged, and elaborate arcade hardware.

Sometimes, this overlap was quite profound but not 100%. NeoGeo home consoles famously use the same hardware and software as their arcade counterparts, but the game cartridges were not pin-compatible. The Nintendo VS line were technically the same as a Famicom/NES, but not the same build; the software has subtle differences. Perhaps the Nintendo PlayChoice would count but again, it's not like they used NES mainboards to build those.

So, the idea of taking a Nintendo console mainboard and grafting it to SEGA-designed components so it can run in a dedicated arcade cabinet, is just wild to me.

[fredoralive]

The era of bespoke arcade hardware died in the late 90s really. They couldn’t really keep up with consoles / PC with a declining market. By the early 2000s arcades were mostly console derived, beyond the Sega trio of Naomi (Dreamcast), Chihiro (Xbox) and Triforce (Gamecube), Konami and Namco mostly used PlayStation 2 derived hardware. By the late 00’s we were mostly looking at PC based stuff.

[manytimesaway]

Things are much more nuanced than this, at least on SEGA's side.

The Mega Drive derivated from the System 16, but was itself converted into an arcade system.

Titan-Video derivated from the Saturn, according to sources online.

NAOMI/NAOMI 2/Hikaru were derivated from the Dreamcast during development, and there is significant overlap in specs between them and the DC.

Chihiro derivated from the OG Xbox.

[whateveracct]

This is absolutely beautiful. There's so much to be done when you stop looking forward and start looking at points in time in computing.

[psyonity]

I played the F-Zero game recently in an Arcade nearby, it was amazing! I was so suprised when a buddy of mine went like: "Yeah, there is just a Gamecube in this".

[butlike]

The local arcade/bar has two Mario Kart GP 2 cabinets (so you can play linked head to head). I'll have to go check it out after reading this.

[xnx]

For all the thousands of slop coders trying to cash in with low effort app store clones of better (often free and open) apps, the Dolphin team does amazing quality archival quality code and documentation for free. Bravo!

[mongrelion]

The article touches a bit on how Sega basically lost. There is literally a whole documentary about this: Console Wars, where they go deep into how Sega lost the battle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Console_Wars_(film)

[NickC25]

Kickass article. Really took me back to the days of playing FZero AX in the arcade. Incredible game. Great work, Dolphin team!

[kgwxd]

I lol'd right clicking to "Open LINK in a new tab". Not quite as funny when I got there, but great none the less.

[SuperHeavy256]

A fantastic new addition to Dolphin

[jihadjihad]

Dank wizardry deserves to be rewarded.

[kg]

Emulation is legal in the US

[2001zhaozhao]

Somewhat of an aside but I had the thought reading this that arcades would be a great format for games heavily involving GenAI. The pay-per-play model is probably the only model where you can either affordably use a lot of LLM tokens per game. Alternatively, having large commercial arcade machines is the only way to guarantee the very high hardware specs needed to run capable models locally.

Perhaps as a result, we might see LLM and video model-powered games become mainstream in arcades before any home consumer platforms.