In the discussion of the Triforce arcade compatibility, there's some discussion of "IC Card" support needing to be implemented, and doing so unlocking a lot of missing functionality.
I think this is referring to the Japanese rail payment cards? I know you can use them on things like vending machines, but from the article it seems like the Triforce cabinets let you save game progress on them too, which would be a great feature I've never seen in US arcades.
> Triforce games can support two types of cards for saving: Magnetic Cards (magcards) and Integrated Circuit (IC) cards. Magcards are cheaper, fragile, and can only survive so many writes before failing. They have the added bonus of having a printable side, where the game can print a player's achievements and more. IC cards are more like old credit cards with a thicker plastic. They weren't printable, but were much sturdier.
It's referring to memory cards. This is the Triforce feature, almost every game on it uses cards for savegames. The arcades you're thinking of almost certainly had a version of Mario Kart Arcade GP - you may just not have played it.
> All of this just to let Dolphin play online with real Wii consoles in a game whose official servers are since long dead and whose replacement servers have a peak of only 15 concurrent online players.
Knowing there's people out that who have such absurd levels of dedication makes me so happy.
I always love reading the dolphin progress reports. They do a good job of explaining how things work and parsing it out into something easy to understand
Dolphin is bringing back support for the Triforce arcade cabinet that was jointly developed by Nintendo, Sega and Namco that was dropped by Dolphin in 2016.
Notably games includes F-Zero AX (not to be confused with F-Zero GX on Gamecube) and Mario Kart Arcade GP 1 and 2.
Though I don't know if you can count it as a "buried lede" if the first paragraph of the article is dedicated to it, with a big clickable banner, haha!
What is the most reliable place for ROMs these days? Is there any sort of checksum that can accompany them to ensure safety? While I trust Dolphin, I don't trust most ROMs.
In all my years of emulation, I've never come across a malicious ROM for a major console.
Dolphin runs its own VM. Obviously anything is possible, but developing some kind of breakout-ROM which would infect the host machine is just way more engineering than I could imagine ever being worth it. The vector is just too complex, and the target (nerds downloading retro games) just isn't worth the squeeze.
Archive.org actually hosts a good chunk of the major Gamecube ROMs. Good luck!
There's tons of options, no-intro, redump, tosec, mame are all doing DAT files with file checksums.
That said, ROMs are basically never a malware vector as they have to exploit an issue in the emulators themselves and historically that hasn't really been seen. Typically malware related to roms happens with files included in the zip archives or by sites offering "downloaders" with embedded malware.
I've had pretty good success with CleanRip https://wiibrew.org/wiki/CleanRip#Wii_DAT_download for acquiring ROM files. With it, I was able to backup my entire personal collection with minimal fuss, and can now enjoy that collection in HD with Dolphin's various enhancements.
For verification you generally want the Redump database, which has checksums for most disc-based console releases. Unfortunately they seem to be offline at the moment, or I'd share a canonical link. Look around for that.
It's been done, the ZSNES and Project64 emulators have both had exploits which allowed a malicious ROM to run arbitrary code on the host. ZSNES is written mostly in assembly so that was kinda asking for trouble though.
In the discussion of the Triforce arcade compatibility, there's some discussion of "IC Card" support needing to be implemented, and doing so unlocking a lot of missing functionality.
I think this is referring to the Japanese rail payment cards? I know you can use them on things like vending machines, but from the article it seems like the Triforce cabinets let you save game progress on them too, which would be a great feature I've never seen in US arcades.
> Triforce games can support two types of cards for saving: Magnetic Cards (magcards) and Integrated Circuit (IC) cards. Magcards are cheaper, fragile, and can only survive so many writes before failing. They have the added bonus of having a printable side, where the game can print a player's achievements and more. IC cards are more like old credit cards with a thicker plastic. They weren't printable, but were much sturdier.
Source with photos: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2026/02/16/rise-of-the-triforce...
It's referring to memory cards. This is the Triforce feature, almost every game on it uses cards for savegames. The arcades you're thinking of almost certainly had a version of Mario Kart Arcade GP - you may just not have played it.
> All of this just to let Dolphin play online with real Wii consoles in a game whose official servers are since long dead and whose replacement servers have a peak of only 15 concurrent online players.
Knowing there's people out that who have such absurd levels of dedication makes me so happy.
I always love reading the dolphin progress reports. They do a good job of explaining how things work and parsing it out into something easy to understand
I think the lede is somewhat being buried here.
Dolphin is bringing back support for the Triforce arcade cabinet that was jointly developed by Nintendo, Sega and Namco that was dropped by Dolphin in 2016.
Notably games includes F-Zero AX (not to be confused with F-Zero GX on Gamecube) and Mario Kart Arcade GP 1 and 2.
This is pretty big!
https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2026/02/16/rise-of-the-triforce...
There was a thread on it a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47040524
Though I don't know if you can count it as a "buried lede" if the first paragraph of the article is dedicated to it, with a big clickable banner, haha!
I really enjoy how clearly excited the author is about what they wrote here.
JMC is the goat, I had the pleasure of reporting melee netplay bugs with him and he is just so Inquisitive and interested in everything.
Do they accept donations? I couldn’t find anything on the website.
They don't: https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-dolphin-donations?pid=...
Fantastic! I always wonder if the original console devs would be able to provide bonus insight.
What is the most reliable place for ROMs these days? Is there any sort of checksum that can accompany them to ensure safety? While I trust Dolphin, I don't trust most ROMs.
In all my years of emulation, I've never come across a malicious ROM for a major console.
Dolphin runs its own VM. Obviously anything is possible, but developing some kind of breakout-ROM which would infect the host machine is just way more engineering than I could imagine ever being worth it. The vector is just too complex, and the target (nerds downloading retro games) just isn't worth the squeeze.
Archive.org actually hosts a good chunk of the major Gamecube ROMs. Good luck!
There's tons of options, no-intro, redump, tosec, mame are all doing DAT files with file checksums.
That said, ROMs are basically never a malware vector as they have to exploit an issue in the emulators themselves and historically that hasn't really been seen. Typically malware related to roms happens with files included in the zip archives or by sites offering "downloaders" with embedded malware.
I've had pretty good success with CleanRip https://wiibrew.org/wiki/CleanRip#Wii_DAT_download for acquiring ROM files. With it, I was able to backup my entire personal collection with minimal fuss, and can now enjoy that collection in HD with Dolphin's various enhancements.
For verification you generally want the Redump database, which has checksums for most disc-based console releases. Unfortunately they seem to be offline at the moment, or I'd share a canonical link. Look around for that.
Now there's an interesting challenge. A ROM that does a VM breakout and runs a command on the host.
It's been done, the ZSNES and Project64 emulators have both had exploits which allowed a malicious ROM to run arbitrary code on the host. ZSNES is written mostly in assembly so that was kinda asking for trouble though.