After twenty years of emulating GameCube and Wii, Dolphin just broke out of living rooms and into the arcades. The latest version of Dolphin now officially supports Nintendo’s Triforce arcade hardware, bringing a small but beloved library of arcade exclusives into the fold.
Triforce support isn’t exactly new to Dolphin (there’s been a dedicated fork floating around for years), but it was always janky, never properly maintained, and eventually disabled altogether in 2016. The problem was that Triforce, despite being built on GameCube hardware by Nintendo, Sega, and Namco, had enough quirks (proprietary GD-ROMs, unique I/O boards, arcade-specific networking) that it kept breaking the main codebase. Rather than keep patching over it, the devs spun it off into its own branch and let it languish.
Now, in February 2026, that work has been dusted off, rebuilt from scratch, and reintegrated into mainline Dolphin. The latest dev build (2512-395) can boot every Triforce game except one, and crucially, it’s already working on Android. That means handhelds with decent overhead (SD865 and up) should be able to run Mario Kart Arcade GP, Virtua Striker, and F-Zero AX without needing a separate fork or a prayer.
The Triforce library is small but punchy, with just over a dozen games. The big draws are the two Mario Kart Arcade GP titles (2005 and 2007), which added Pac-Man characters and item-scanning gimmicks you’d never see on a home console, and F-Zero AX (2003), the arcade companion to F-Zero GX that let you unlock content between the two versions. Sega contributed the Virtua Striker series (Virtua Striker 3 Ver. 2002 and Virtua Striker 4 ), keeping the soccer arcade tradition alive.
Then there’s The Key of Avalon, a Japan-only card-battler RPG series that got multiple expansions between 2003 and 2005, and Gekitou Pro Yakyuu, a Japanese baseball title from 2003 that almost nobody outside of Japan has ever heard of. An arcade version of Star Fox was planned but never released. It’s not a massive catalog, but between F-Zero AX and the Mario Kart GP games, there’s enough here to justify the emulation effort, especially since these were effectively marooned in arcades for two decades.
Since Triforce cabinets were designed to link together for multiplayer, they’ve actually gotten it working in emulation. A full setup guide is on the way, but the idea of running a networked Mario Kart Arcade GP session across multiple Retroid Pockets is already sending me into a frenzy.
