Unlike the Naomi the Tri Force motherboard is pretty fussy about the hardware it accepts. I had to buy a completely different DIMM with firmware V3.17. However, it was worth the additional expense. Scotland managing to sneak a goal against Denmark... if only! It's a much lengthier process booting up the Tri Force compared to the Naomi. Now to track down an affordable EXPORT version of V. Striker 2006.
i got most of the triforce games and i have to say that all are pure crap, this is the only decent one kinda curious your machine works with a 3.17 dim, mine only works with the 3.03 dim it came with
What was the point of Triforce? Given the arcade hardware at the time it didn't really look like it offered anything that one of the other arcade platforms that Sega or Namco had at the time and it wasn't much cheaper. Well apart from the possible Nintendo licenses anyway..
I'm not entirely sure tbh! It was a bit of an odd ball. It uses the same development kit as the Naomi, uses the same DIMM and GDrom as the Naomi and has all of the same connections as the Naomi. Unlike the original Naomi it cannot use the older DIMM, it requires 512Mb of RAM on V3.17, unlike most Naomi titles which don't care about the DIMM so much and are happy enough on 256Mb RAM. Even a lot of Naomi 2 titles run on that. It takes ages to load (I would say 3 times the length of the Naomi), but I do need a new battery for the DIMM so that it remains resident in memory. There are very few titles available and most of them require unique controller boards etc. About the only title that will happily run are the Virtua Striker series, but I believe the next one up requires a card reader (which I would need to hunt down). The Naomi truly is the more versatile of units. A bit like Everest, I did it because "it was there". Goodness knows why Naomi, Sega & Nintendo did (other than as you say for Nintendo licensed games?)
That was available on eBay over the weekend for a silly price - I think it actually sold! I may end-up selling this Tri Force board, but I need the DIMM for the Naomi 2 unit. Really just wanted to prove it functioned properly. It's a cool little item, but not much use to me as I already have a soccer title for the N2 board.
Not sure what you mean? I am saying 'Finally Works!' because it took me almost a year to get my ass into gear. This motherboard was sitting in the attic for most of that time un-tested and unused. I eventually hooked it up to the WRONG DIMM board and was convinced it was needing repaired, took it to pieces and could find nothing wrong. It was the reply to a query I posted that pointed out that Tri Force only seemed to work on V3.17 firmware (Andy at Sega Shed) that finally got the unit running because I purchased the necessary parts from him. However, I need the V3.17 DIMM for my Naomi 2. So, this proves that the Tri Force motherboard works and I may sell it on to anyone interested in Game Cube / Ninty / Arcade stuff.
