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Comment by nebulous1 | Hacker News Reader

I remember Sierra games frequently developing timing issues as PCs got faster. They never seemed to get that one down.

A lot of their game logic times based on "game cycles" instead of something proper like counting seconds. ScummVM runs a lot of old Sierra games; it applies some patches to game scripts to fix these issues and also throttles some stuff to make it run at a proper speed on modern hardware.

Computer software was incapable of the completely of modern languages and practices because stack overflow didn't exist. Until windows came along with a time api based on datetime most games just used CPU clock cycles like you identified. CPU speed is the ultimate time api.

The only use of the "turbo" button on some PCs in the 90s I found was to slow the machine down for the few older games that didn't have code to deal with the various speeds.

That's it's intended use. It's more of an anti-turbo, but you can run in compat or fast modes. And some of them had a sweet MHz display that was just set with jumpers so you could put BS and wow your friends.

I knew a computer reseller through my father and the turbo button was just a glowing button on the front a user could turn on or off without affected the CPU speed. In other words it became a marketing gimmick and I suspect more often than not it was not functional in any way except to give the user the idea that their 386SX was in TURBO mode.

More accurately, it was real on earlier hardware when people had things like games which were unusable on processors faster than IBM’s original 4.77MHz 8086 processor. As a kid I had a hand-me-down system where that was definitely necessary for a handful of older games.

That meant almost every case had that button and people got used to it. That didn’t mean it was always connected - we’re talking a simple cable connecting to a couple of pins on the motherboard so this was trivial - and I knew a couple of people who disconnected it to keep kids or certain hopeless adults from clicking it, forgetting, and then complaining that the computer was slow.

By the late 386/486 era that’d become pretty common and you stopped seeing it as much.

I remember using turbo switch when playing Tetris. At the startup game would try to adjust its speed to the speed of the hardware it was running on so turning of turbo (basically lowering 8086 frequency from 10 to 4.77Mhz) resulted in a game being so slow that it was possible to easily reach scores over 20k.

That was it's specific intent.

I came across an issue in grim fandango and that was released in the late(?) 90s

“Good enough for government work”

Because it was expensive on old hardware. Companies tried to squeeze a lot into a game especially when there was little space to have. Some games even reused fonts, images and sounds that are already part of the operating system.

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