Timeline for answer to What did the 'turbo' button actually do? by mschaef
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
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18 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Nov 30, 2023 at 9:11 | comment | added | Tommylee2k | I worked in a computer company that days, and sometimes we setup the 7 segment displays to show "HI" and "LO", instead of what the clock speed was | |
| May 29, 2019 at 5:11 | comment | added | dan04 | Your last paragraph nicely explains why the button logic wasn't inverted and labelled "Slow". | |
| May 22, 2019 at 15:44 | comment | added | amcgregor | Most games developed after a certain point (e.g. beyond DOS days) utilized "timing loops" during startup to figure out the relationship between CPU speed and wall clock time, to scale the game's event loop to maintain consistent performance. When AMD introduced frequency scaling—dynamic adaption of the CPU frequency to CPU load—those initial timing loops were often very wrong. Counter-Strike, back then, didn't account for this, so you'd run around in-game at 4x the speed of everyone else… without triggering anti-cheat! Similar could be achieved manually via the turbo button. | |
| May 22, 2019 at 10:21 | comment | added | Holger | @Geo... and all PCs, I ever encountered, did nothing else but change the LED when the “turbo” button was toggled. Which was reasonable for machines that couldn’t go back to 8086 stock PCs anyway (same clock speed doesn’t imply same execution speed)… | |
| May 22, 2019 at 6:53 | comment | added | Luaan | @val Actually, there's no overlap. While there was a bug in Turbo Pascal's CRT (division by zero in a delay function if the computer clock didn't change when measuring the speed), it only happened around 300 MHz or so CPUs (early Pentiums, especially combined with the new tricks these employed to be even faster). There was no turbo button for those. | |
| May 22, 2019 at 6:38 | comment | added | val - disappointed in SE | Turbo(!) Pascal having problems with Turbo(!) mode is perfect. | |
| May 21, 2019 at 20:49 | comment | added | brhfl | @Geo A few of us spent a day reassembling an old machine in a HS programming class just so we could make the turbo readout say 'FU'. Ah, maturity... | |
| May 21, 2019 at 18:11 | comment | added | Wayne Werner | On the flip-side, mo' slo was great when trying to play Bouncing Babies on a faster computer. | |
| May 21, 2019 at 15:46 | comment | added | Hellion | I remember firing up Wing Commander (also written to run on stock 8086-based PCs, I believe) on a hot new 25MHz 80386 system. You could see things happening but could not possibly provide input fast enough to affect the missions in any way. | |
| May 21, 2019 at 11:31 | comment | added | Geo... | I think it is also worth noting that many PC's had LED 'readouts' that showed the CPU speed when in/out of turbo mode. These LED displays had absolutely nothing to do with the actual speed of the computer, and were configured by an array of jumpers on the backplane that allowed you to configure whatever you wanted the display to show. For example, the LED display in a 486DX2/66 might be jumpered to show 66 when turbo was 'on' and 04 or 08 when the turbo was 'off'. But you could really set them to show anything... | |
| May 21, 2019 at 10:07 | vote | accept | Neil Meyer | ||
| May 20, 2019 at 20:43 | comment | added | LAK | The Epson Equity 2/2+ and 3/3+ 286 machines my office had in the late 80s actually had switches for 8/10 Mhz, or 10/12Mhz in the case of the '+' models. None of the business software we ran at the time (WordPerfect, dBase ||, FoxBase) cared, so we kept them on the fastest setting. | |
| May 20, 2019 at 18:47 | comment | added | fernando.reyes | I used to play the games Gorillas on QBasic, that used an empty for loop to slow down the animations, and worked on a 25Mhz machine. When you ran it on a faster machine, the animations were very fast and the game almost unplayable | |
| May 20, 2019 at 18:34 | comment | added | Seldom 'Where's Monica' Needy | I remember playing the old Sim Ant on a machine with a Turbo button. It was useful for quickly skipping through long treks or for waiting for reinforcements to arrive after calling them. | |
| May 20, 2019 at 16:44 | comment | added | Janka | Turbo Pascal fixup button. | |
| May 20, 2019 at 14:44 | history | edited | mschaef | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| May 20, 2019 at 14:36 | history | edited | mschaef | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| May 20, 2019 at 14:30 | history | answered | mschaef | CC BY-SA 4.0 |