The Triforce is an arcade system board
developed jointly by Namco, Sega, and
Nintendo, with the first games appearing in
2002. The name "Triforce" is a reference to
Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda series of games,
and symbolized the three companies'
involvement in the project. The system
hardware is based on the Nintendo GameCube
with several differences, like provisions for add-
ons such as Sega's GD-ROM system and
upgradeable RAM modules. The Triforce was
initially believed to have twice as much 1T-SRAM
as the Nintendo GameCube (48MB instead of
24MB), but this was disproven by a teardown
analysis of a Triforce board.
A few versions of the Triforce exist. The first two
are the Type-1 and Type-3 units, the former
using an external DIMM board (same as used on
the Naomi and Naomi 2) while the latter
integrates this component inside the metal
casing. A custom Namco version exists which
only accepts custom NAND Flash based
cartridges, which has a different Media board
and supposedly different baseboard. These
boards use the same metal case design as the
Type-3 Triforce.