Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 3DX+ is the final game Bandai Namco (then Namco Bandai) produced for the Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 3 arcade cabinets. Maxi 3DX+ as it's affectionately known was released in Japan on March 4, 2010, and internationally later that year.
The game itself is based on the Wangan Midnight manga from 1990, itself based on real-life a group called Mid Night Racing Team, an extremely notorious and shadowy group of tuners and racers that prowled the Shuto Expressway from 1982 onwards in Tōkyō. The Shuto Expressway is network of highways with on-ramps, off-ramps and interchanges between the different lines. Here is a clip of someone battling on the C1. I'm not sure if this is Mid Night or not.
The university I attended in Tōkyō, Sophia University, was right behind Shinjuku Route (4) of the Shuto. While I was abroad I played a lot of Wangan Maximum Tune 5DX+ because that was the latest game out.
Wangan Midnight is a manga, anime and later a game based on this legend. The Wangan Maximum Tune 3DX+ (and 3DX, and 3) cabinet uses the Namco System N2 with these specs (shamelessly lifted from Wikipedia, the world encyclopedia):
Motherboard: MSI K7N2GM-IL (NVIDIA nForce2 Chipset, Custom BIOS) (Japan/Asia) / ASUS M2N-MX (Export, Standard BIOS)
CPU: AMD K7 Mobile Athlon XP 2800+ at 2.13 GHz (Socket A/462) [3] (Japan/Asia) / AMD Athlon 64 3500+ at 2.2 GHz (Socket 939) [4] (Export)
RAM: 1×1GB / 2×1GB DDR 400 MHz 3200 MB/s
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 4 series / GeForce 7600 GS AGP with 256/512MB GDDR2 memory (GeForce 7800 GS AGP for some japan region maximum tune N2s)
Output: 1 DVI port, 1 VGA port, 1 S-Video port
Storage: Seagate 80GB (Japan/Asia) / WD 80GB PATA IDE HDD (Export)
Operating System: Linux 32-bit (Debian based)
Sound: stereo RCA output from front panel audio with external AMP PCB (Audio duplicated to rear speakers by amp)
Protection: HASP HL Max/RTC USB dongle (v0.06)
Maximum Tune 2 and Maximum Tune 1 cabinets used the Sega Chihiro platform. The OG Wangan Midnight game, which lacked the "Maximum Tune" title, used the Namco 246.
I've played on two 3DX+ cabinets, one English and one Japanese. This game was the last Maximum Tune game to be released outside of Asia until Maximum Tune 5 in 2017. Cards issued from the Japanese version are not usable on the international cabinets, and vice-versa.
Maxi 3 cabinets have a card reader-writer which records player data on a magnetic stripe card which can be purchased from the machine for an additional credit. After 3DX+ the magnetic card was replaced by the Banapassport. Below is my card from 3DX+ (JP):
Sadly there are very few Maxi 3DX+ cabinets in existence and fewer whose card readers work. Before the 3DX+ machines near me disappeared I brought my Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution VI GSR (above) up to 640HP on the JP cabinet and had raised my Skyline GT-R to 470HP on the EN cabinet.
This JP 3DX+ cabinet was in a barcade for whatever reason while the EN version was in a Namco arcade in a tiny mall near a small engineering firm I interned at for about 6 months. Neither machine exists anymore, at least at the places above.
There are 100 chapters in 3DX+, they all mostly have the same structure of racing against characters on the Shuto Expressway. After beating chapters upgrades to either the power or handling upgrades of the car are unlocked. The cabinets are also locally networked, meaning players can challenge others sitting at adjacent cabinets in "VS" mode. The winner continues playing for free, effectively taking the loser's credit.