Namco Bandai Plans PS3 Arcade Board

Officials from Japanese publisher and arcade manufacturer Namco Bandai have announced that the company is developing a series of new arcade games which will use the Cell microprocessor, according to a new Reuters report. The new arcade hardware will also use the same Nvidia designed RSX graphics chip as the PlayStation 3, which will make conversions between future arcade titles and the PlayStation 3 relatively easy. Further details obtained by Japanese newspaper the Mainichi Daily News has revealed that Namco Bandai's Tekken 6, the latest iteration of its popular fighting game series, will be the first game to debut on the new hardware, due out later this year. In recent years it has been common for variations of console chipsets to be used in arcade machines, with Sega making use of the Xbox-derived Chihiro for titles such as OutRun 2 and The House of the Dead III. A variation of the GameCube chipset called Triforce was also used by both Sega and Namco for games such as F-Zero AX and Mario Kart Arcade GP. The Namco System 246 arcade board is based on the PlayStation 2 chipset and was widely used by the company, before its merger with Bandai, for titles such as Tekken 4 and Time Crisis 3. The board was also used by other arcade manufacturers including Capcom and Taito. The use of the PlayStation 3 architecture in Namco Bandai’s new arcade games will mark the first time that the Cell processor has been used in any consumer product other than the PlayStation 3 – despite reports that Sony had attempted to interest Apple in the technology.