• givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Everytime someone talks about old computers, it makes me miss the 90s “turbo button”

    There were built in over clocks that could be activated while the computer was running.

    So anytime you loaded up a game, you got to engage it with a physical button.

    • Kitty Jynx@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      A lot of games didn’t work properly if turbo mode was engaged. They would run unplayably fast, have crazy game breaking visual glitches, or just crash. A few of my games had a splash screen reminding the user to turn off turbo mode. The turbo button was mainly there to speed up processing for mundane tasks like spreadsheets or for compiling code.

      • ramble81@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        It was basically to downclock the CPU because old computer games were built to run off of the speed of the CPU. When processors got faster those games scaled up their speed too. Normally you’d leave turbo on all the time except when playing those games. You turned it off and it would restrict the clock speed on the CPU.

      • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Maybe I never noticed it as a kid?

        But I never played PC games on any other computer, so I might have just been playing on hard mode that whole time.

        I do specifically remember Street Fighter (2?) on PC being the hardest video game ever, so that would explain it.