Rise of the Triforce | Hacker News Reader

Rise of the Triforce

dolphin-emu.org

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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

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...

Is there anything worthwhile in moving games at Gigo 3? Even back in the Sega era it felt like it was mostly those generic Taito cabinets running most things.

If my memory is correct, they have OutRun, Rad Mobile, Sega Rally, and a few other classic racing games.

That's correct, last time I was there they had those games.

Zenius: https://zenius-i-vanisher.com/v5.2/arcade.php?id=2701#games has a list of the games, please bare in mind that this is a community driven database.

There's Sega Rally 2 and Dirt Dash which both have motion cabinets.

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.

Right?? There is a working original After Burner in an arcade in Leeds - on free play and just open to kids of all ages. Sooo many places where it could trap a finger, and it moves pretty violently.

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.

In Codona's Amusement Park in Aberdeen in the late 90s, there was a Ridge Racer "cabinet" with three massive rear projection screens and an ACTUAL REAL MAZDA MX5 TO SIT IN.

WHAAAAAAAAAT

Seriously insane levels of money-no-object zero-fucks-given design.

This is painful to me on three levels: 1. Real estate costs have gone up so much it’s prohibitively expensive to do something this grand. 2. Advertising is now a race to the bottom where showing car ads on websites has almost zero cost with all return compared to something novel like this. 3. It’s impossible to find a car like a 90s Miata these days because manual transmissions are almost dead and every car had to get heavier to have enough safety features to survive being T-boned by a Cybertruck.

Agree on the rest, but thankfully for #3 a modern base ND Miata with the 1.5 is pretty close to in weight to a NA due to a lot of weight saving work by Mazda.

I remember our arcade having one of these too! But I never had enough money to use it - and probably was too short anyway

They’re being made but I just don’t think there’s a whole lot of demand/spaces for them. People sure don’t want them in their homes and arcades barely exist in many countries now.

I’ve seen a couple of bars open up that try to have an arcade as well but they never take care of the machines/drunk people break them, so after a few months half the games don’t even work. There’s only so many times I can lose a quarter or a dollar before I decide it’s not worth it anymore and I just go drink somewhere else with friends.

The only real arcade left in my city is attached to a laser tag, it would be super weird for a bunch of grown men in their 30s and 40s to roll up during kids’ birthday parties they weren’t invited to lol

Yeah, this tracks. My city has a few "retro" arcade bars with pinball, pacman, etc, and it's fun enough but you're for sure going for the nostalgia more than anything else.

I think part of the barrier to expanding the attached-to-other-things arcade concept is the whole aesthetic: an arcade is loud, with flashing lights, giant and sometimes lurid artwork on the machines. I think if you were able to make some machines that gave a high quality experience without all that side of it, you might be able to install them in other semi-public spaces: airports, train stations, shopping malls, basically anywhere you currently see things like massage chairs.

That said, maintenance is for sure a concern. The state of most public pianos does not inspire confidence.

There's this in London and Birmingham:

https://f1arcade.com/uk

They have 50-odd full-motion Formula One simulators in each location and they seem to be aiming for a much higher quality experience than an arcade.

Today by comparison with that era (think 1996's Scud Race) arcades should have 4k raytraced driving games almost close to real life videos

At least in the US, those "deluxe" cabs with motion just never seemed like a viable deal to me as a kid/teenager visiting arcades.

It was like, $1 per game compared to $0.25 or $0.50 for a normal cabinet.

As a young person with limited income, it DEFINITELY mattered to me... I preferred to sacrifice a little bit of motion and enjoy 2x or 4x the playtime on something else. I mean realistically you'd be spending $20 an hour or more if you stuck to deluxe cabinets. At that point (according to my teenage mind) I was basically halfway to buying a home console game that I could keep forever.

Operators really should have priced those deluxe cabinets the same as regular games during off-peak hours.

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

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!

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.

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

I think it's also a benefit in someways though. Preservation should be much easier and more accessible this way. Also maintainability.

Well what I mean is how they been printing PCBs and experimenting. Perhaps has lot to do with the then-very vivid generation. Sadly Japan is aging and very closed to outer influx, so this culture may as easily die at all.

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.

The Gamecube was competitive on graphics with PS2 and Xbox. It was the Wii where there console side moved away from keeping up in the cutting edge graphics race.

I’m not sure how successful it was, it was outsold by Xbox and PS2. Although the Xbox was a massive money pit for Microsoft. At least in Europe the Gamecube began to disappear from retail a fair bit before the Wii was out as well. Still, got things like a Wavebird for cheap on clearance though…

I think the big thing that held gamecube back was the lack of other 'utility', at least as someone who was in college at the time.

Can't play DVDs (PS2, or XBox with the remote accessory,) can't even play audio CDs. Let's remember that this was also an era where half or less of the on campus freshmen had a desktop computer for their dorm, let alone something like a laptop.

That said one could also argue that Nintendo was more focused on mobile at the time, between the GBA and DS, both of which certainly carried them through that era.

I think one could argue that the DS's success alongside the challenges Gamecube had for adoption, led to the philosophy involved in the Wii's design.

True. I remember there was a window of time in which the PS2 was the cheapest DVD player you could get, or at least the cheapest in most stores. That was about the time when most consumers were feeling pressure to drop VHS. It was also pretty common for people to have CD binders full of pirated movies on DVD, very popular in colleges then, and kids bringing home those huge stashes of movies also motivated a lot of people to replace their VCRs. The PS2 with it's DVD playing functionality was well timed and well priced.

I can't recall if the PS2 was cheaper than available DVD players when it launched, but I do distinctly remember it being true of the PS3 and Blu-ray for some time given how new it was then

PS2 was cheaper at announce time, but by launch there were units priced 'competitively' (not always with PS2's capabilities such as ability to do component out, but almost always with a better UX).

I should note the 'other' option that came up back then at college was just tossing a DVD Drive in a computer that they had or had purchased; by that point a majority/plurality of new/recent desktops had enough horsepower to do it, though drives were still fairly expensive...

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

I think you're underselling the role of their game design expertise. They figured out that there's more to games than high fidelity graphics, a concept which has somehow alluded most AAA game studios.

Yeah, their "corporate mascots" are valuable IP because they are associated with fun games. The games aren't fun because of the mascots, it's the other way around.

Forming a relationship with children when they're most impressionable for marketing and later nostalgia trips helps too.

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.

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.

Yeah I suspect that you're right and it's a capacitor issue because if I leave the Cube running in its cute little BIOS-like thing for about 15 minutes then the optical drive starts working again. I suspect the caps or maybe the laser itself just needs to physically warm up.

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.

I'm also printing a new bracket to put a larger fan in, replacing the battle worn 20 year old stock fan

The fan is a bit loud, but it seems to work correctly, so I don't plan to touch it.

However, the GC has a CR2032 battery to save the time and a few settings, and that battery was dead. But in Nintendo's infinite wisdom, the battery is soldered, not socketed, and the space around it is quite tight so a normal socket will not fit. Removing it and soldering a battery socket was quite a chore, I needed to try different models until I found one that fits, but in the end I managed to do it. When the new battery dies in 10~20 years it will be much easier to replace it.

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!

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

Must have taken a heckin' amount of work!

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

In context in this case, “hell of a lot of.” Seems we English speakers come up with myriad grammatical constructions to seem less offensive in certain forums.

Well, mostly I realized my first sentence was likely to come off more negative than funny (I just like, really enjoyed F-Zero GX back in the day!), so I decided to add a folksy salute to the effort to dilute that. And a smiley face, people heckin' love those =)

Interesting. I associate the term with reddit, not being folksy. I think the folksy term would be "fuckin lot" or "very lot" or "hella".

I think maybe you were trying to cater to the "christians" or snowflake conservatives

It's linguistically a minced oath[1], and they're pretty common in all manner of online contexts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minced_oath

Great reference; thank you.

"Heck" is to "Hell" like "Darn" is to "Damn" (or "Freaking" to “F--ing") - a word that sounds similar but is more polite, to be said in public in more religious places and times.

That can't explain "hecking", because there is no form "helling".

From Wiktionary entry for heckin':

Etymology

From heck as a euphemism for hell.

This still doesn't make sense as "hellin" isnt a term in wide use. What makes the most sense is transition from "fuckin". But why not simply use fuckin? Surely invoking sex is less taboo than invoking hell.

> What makes the most sense is transition from "fuckin". But why not simply use fuckin?

Indeed, you have a community that wants to be family friendly but high energy, and so the technique is to start with "fucking", one of the top tier swears, and replace its root word with the lowest tier swears. And part of the charm is that "hell" is barely a taboo topic -- it's part of the Apostle's creed and plenty of sermons, and there's no commandment against its use[1], yet it gets minced to "heck"!

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou_shalt_not_take_the_name_o...

It's a form of hella which is "hell of" but hecka sounds silly so you get heckin. (Heck is also used as a substitute for fuck sometimes and takes its forms.)

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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!

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)

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

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.

A fantastic new addition to Dolphin

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.

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