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Anyone remember "Turbo" buttons?
by recursive 5y ago
Anyone remember "Turbo" buttons?
- TacticalCoder 5y agoOf course! The crazy thing is that you could do it while the computer was running and it was mostly fine: DOS and many DOS games would just happily keep working, just at slighly different speeds. But then it wasn't uncommon for the PC to just freeze and then it needed a reboot. But the best feature, to me, was those PC with a turbo button that also had a seven-segment display showing the current speed. This was looking really cool.
- bestouff 5y agoI distinctly rememver taking one apart and being very disappointed: the segment display was completely fake and showed 2 predefined numbers, not correlated to the CPU frequency at all.
- jblazevic 5y agoUnless you set them correctly to actual CPU frequencies, in which case they correlated perfectly.
- Tagbert 5y agoWe added a variable frequency control to an IBM/AT and used it to adjust the CPU clock up to the point just below where the system would crash. Default was 6 MHz but we could push it up to around 10 MHz before it started crashing. That seemed amazingly fast at the time.
- MikusR 5y agoThey were to slow the cpu down.
- eyelidlessness 5y agoThis is technically correct (the best kind…) however many people will have a different experience because it was sometimes inverted to be more intuitive.
- duxup 5y agoMy 486 had one. At the time I had no idea what it was and...not sure I do now.
- User23 5y agoIt was mainly for games written for the older CPUs that used CPU timing for the main game event loop. Turning off "turbo" would reduce the clock frequency and slow the game down to a playable speed.
- doublepg23 5y agoGreat YouTube video on them! https://youtu.be/p2q02Bxtqds https://youtu.be/p2q02Bxtqds
- olgeni 5y agoOr Ctrl+Alt+- if your turbo button wasn't actually wired on the cheap XT clone...