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[king zell]

this is the fourth game to run on Triforce

I am tey to hear about a Namco game for the board.. mmm

well more SEGA arcade ports = good

gamefront.de

 

[jarrod]

List time!!!

SYSTEM 246 (Namco owned, licensed from SCEI)
-Vampire Night (Wow Entertainment) also on PS2

TRIFORCE (Nintendo/Sega/Namco co-owned)
-F-Zero AX (Amusement Vision) also on GCN
-F-Zero AX: Monster Ride (Amusement Vision)
-Getikou Pro Yakyuu (Wow Entertainment) also on GCN/PS2
-Key of Avalon, The: The Wizard Master (Hitmaker)
-Key of Avalon, The: Summon the New Monsters (Hitmaker)
-Virtua Striker 2002 (Amusement Vision) also on GCN
-Virtua Striker 4 (Smilebit)

CHIHIRO (Sega owned, licensed from Microsoft)
-Crazy Taxi: High Roller (Hitmaker) also on XBox/PC
-Ghost Squad (Sega-AM2)
-House of the Dead III, The (Wow Entertainment) also on XBox
-Ollie King (Amusement Vision)
-Outrun 2 (Sega-AM2) also on XBox
-Sega Golf Club Network Pro Tour (Sega-AM2)
-Sega Network Taisen MJ-2 (Sega-AM2)
-Virtua Cop 3 (Sega-AM2)


I bet VS4 gets PS2 and GC ports next spring...

 

[ge-man]

It seemed like the Triforce was almost dead as an arcade format. I wonder what the price vs spec ratio is between it and Chirhiro.

 

[Mejilan]

What the hell is that Monster Ride F-Zero game? Is that just the multi-cabinet version?

 

[jarrod]

It seemed like the Triforce was almost dead as an arcade format. I wonder what the price vs spec ratio is between it and Chirhiro.

It's likely because the VS team wants to offer it as an upgrade kit to the existing VS2002 machines. Plus the team has no Chihiro/XBox experience so they'd be starting from scratch in terms of engines and GC might be a more attractive consumer release option than XBox, particularly for Japan.

In general, I think Sega's teams (though really it's just AM2 so far) choose Chihiro over Triforce since it's fully owned and there might be some sort of royalty sharing with Nintendo/Namco on TF. AM2 reps have said they went with Chihiro because it's higher spec but TF actually has more RAM and upgraded spec beyond GameCube (while Chihiro is essentially an XBox in a cabinet) so I'm not sure that's really true...

What the hell is that Monster Ride F-Zero game? Is that just the multi-cabinet version?

It's the deluxe "roller coaster" version.

 

[GigaDrive]

ha! and magicbox reported Virtua Striker 4 was running on a next generation board called System SP.

 

[Andy787]

Sega owns the Chihiro board?

 

[jarrod]

Sega owns the Chihiro board?

Yep, they just licensed the components. Similar to how Sammy licensed the innards for Atomiswave from Sega, Seta licensed N64 technology for the Alek64 or Namco's licensed SCEI tech for their System 10/11/12/246/258 boards.

 

[Socreges]

I like how people would rather discuss the board than the game. Virtua Striker fucking sucks.

 

[Renegade]

I don't think a Gamecube port will be in their best interests if they want to profit. Beach Spikers and Virtua Striker, as well as Sega Soccer Slam, Sold embarrasingly poorly.

 

[fo shizzle]

Xbox is more powerful than Triforce. The Triforce is no different from GameCube except it has more RAM and has more external connections. That's it.

 

[jarrod]

I don't think a Gamecube port will be in their best interests if they want to profit. Beach Spikers and Virtua Striker, as well as Sega Soccer Slam, Sold embarrasingly poorly.

Development costs will already be covered in the arcade, resources for a GC port are essentially nothing. Besides, Homerun King bombing didn't keep Wow from porting GPY to GameCube a year later.... a GC port of VS4 is so low risk it probably wouldn't even have to sell 10k to cover costs.

Also Soccer Slam sold embarrasingly on every platform.

Xbox is more powerful than Triforce. The Triforce is no different from GameCube except it has more RAM and has more external connections. That's it.

That's not what I understand though I've never seen pinned down TF specs (System16 only gives what's been confirmed). Early reports also had a higher clocked Gekko CPU. Besides that though, RAM's really the most important thing and the stock GameCube is already ahead of XBox in some respects anyway. Sega should've just doubled RAM in Chihiro since it's pretty clear not many XBox ports are happening, then it would've been a real monster.

 

[SolidSnakex]

Technically it'd be smart to not port it to any system. It's one of those arcade games that's simply best left in the arcade than brought home. And considering how VS3 sold (13k in Japan and 7k in the US) I doubt Sammy's going to allow any releases of VS4. If it is released they won't be behind the porting and publishing.

 

[jarrod]

Eh, I'm still expecting PS2 and GC ports. PS2 would take a little work but it could potentially be worth it (VS2 sold 300k on DC iirc) and a GC port is essentially effortless (so even if it manages only 20k, it's pure profit).

 

[drohne]

afaik chihiro does have more ram than the xbox; certainly sumo digital's comments on porting outrun would suggest as much.

and i doubt a cpu clock boost and ram would close the gap between gamecube and xbox anyway - the xbox's graphics chip is a year newer. am2 may have other motives as well, but when they say chihiro's the best available hardware they're almost certainly right.

 

[jarrod]

Here's the known tech specs if anyone's interested...

TRIFORCE
CPU : IBM Power PC "Gekko"
Sound DSP : Custom Macronix 16bit DSP @ 81MHz
Main RAM : Main Memory 48 MB MoSys 1T-SRAM, Approximately 10ns Sustainable Latency.
Graphics Engine : "Flipper" (Custom ATI/Nintendo)
Color : 24-bit Color, 24-bit Z Buffer.
Hardware Features : Fog, Subpixel Anti-aliasing, 8 Hardware lights, Alpha Blending, Virtual Texture Design, Multi-texture, Mapping/Bump/Environment Mapping, MIPMAP, Bilinear/Trilinear/Anisotropic Filtering, Real-time Texture Decompression (S3TC), HW 3-line Deflickering filter.


CHIHIRO
CPU : Intel Pentium III 733MHz (133MHz FSB)
Graphics : nVidia XChip 200MHz (based on the nVidia GeForce 3)
Sound Hardware :
1. Cirrus Logic CS4630 Stream Processor (20-bit DAC, programmable to handle 3D sound streams, 2D sound (including DLS-compatible MIDI), MP3 acceleration, Sensaura environmental effects, and other functions)
2. Other sounds may be generated by the CPU via software engines.
3. nVidia nForce (Real time Dolby Digital 5.1 encoding)
RAM : 64MB Unified
Media : Sega GD-Rom
Polygons : 125M Polys/sec (Theoretical Maximum)
Rendering Speed : 4.0 G pixel/sec
Features : Programmable vertex and pixel shading, hardware Transform & Lighting engine, Quincunx FSAA, Anisotropic filtering, bump mapping, hardware lighting, particle effects, other standard 3D features).


...Chihiro seems to have the same exact specs as XBox (like System246 & PS2) despite Sumo Digital's comments.

 

[fo shizzle]

From what I've read, the Triforce CPU and GPU are clocked identically to the ones in the GameCube.

The only difference is that the Triforce has 48 megabytes of 1T-SRAM rather than 24 megabytes; the amount of 81 MHz "A-RAM" (as Nintendo likes to call it) is still 16 megabytes. With this in mind, it has about the same amount of RAM as a standard Xbox, and 16 megabytes of that is too slow to be of any practical use other than as a buffer.

When the Triforce was first unveiled, I was PMing Matt-IGN on the IGN boards, and he said that as far as he has heard, all this was correct.

 

[SolidSnakex]

Eh, I'm still expecting PS2 and GC ports. PS2 would take a little work but it could potentially be worth it (VS2 sold 300k on DC iirc) and a GC port is essentially effortless (so even if it manages only 20k, it's pure profit).

That'd be a small amount of profit and I doubt Sammy would really care. Sega's going to change alot now, and arcade ports that won't make much profit are going to stop. So I doubt we'll see any ports of stuff like Quest of D and other games.

 

[Renegade]

I'm pretty sure that upping the RAM would have raised performance of the Chihiro substantially above that of the home Xbox, or all available home consoles period. A lot of Chihiro games are coming home, and I'm pretty sure that at one point most Chihiro games were planned to come home anyways.

 

[jarrod]

From what I've read, the Triforce CPU and GPU are clocked identically to the ones in the GameCube.

The only difference is that the Triforce has 48 megabytes of 1T-SRAM rather than 24 megabytes; the amount of 81 MHz "A-RAM" (as Nintendo likes to call it) is still 16 megabytes. With this in mind, it has about the same amount of RAM as a standard Xbox, and 16 megabytes of that is too slow to be of any practical use other than as a buffer.

When the Triforce was first unveiled, I was PMing Matt-IGN on the IGN boards, and he said that as far as he has heard, all this was correct.

Really? Was that back when Namco told Matt SC2 was also running on the board?

That'd be a small amount of profit and I doubt Sammy would really care. Sega's going to change alot now, and arcade ports that won't make much profit are going to stop. So I doubt we'll see any ports of stuff like Quest of D and other games.

A consumer port of Virtua Striker 4 could be worthwhile though if it put up DC numbers... and it could probably do that on PS2. GC port is just gravy since it'll take little to no effort.

I'm pretty sure that upping the RAM would have raised performance of the Chihiro substantially above that of the home Xbox, or all available home consoles period. A lot of Chihiro games are coming home, and I'm pretty sure that at one point most Chihiro games were planned to come home anyways.

Well, I'm sure the plan initially was for dual conusmer/amusement release (as HotD3 managed) but that plan has obviously changed. Look at Outrun 2, it took another Sega branch funding the project and hiring a new developer to make it happen. Once AM2 has a newer board to work on I expect the Chihiro releases to dry up pretty quick though, so far they're realy the only team that favors it.

 

[ge-man]

Specs are only a part of the issue. Chirhiro is powerful, but the last interview with an AM2 person that I read suggested that the who things really is about more "bang for our buck" type of performance. Those comments also seem to point at that as a reason why Naomi 2 development has been scaled way back. What ever the specs are on the the Triforce, I have a feeling that the board is too expensive for any real support.

 

[AniHawk]

I don't think a Gamecube port will be in their best interests if they want to profit. Beach Spikers and Virtua Striker, as well as Sega Soccer Slam, Sold embarrasingly poorly.

Sega Soccer Slam didn't do well on any console.

 

[fo shizzle]

Really? Was that back when Namco told Matt SC2 was also running on the board?

Haha. Yes, it was. But I have a feeling that he's right, as nobody else has said differently. And looking at the games, it certainly appears that way, too.