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Follow-Up: My Dad's 1st Computer
(lemmy.world)
So my last post, my dad found his 3rd computer... he finally found his first computer!
Bonus: Back of the receipt has some additional purchases: https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/8ed5e2cb-3a29-4a8d-9f0f-347cc41771f2.jpeg
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.
I think that's backwards - the turbo button (very unintuitively) actually slowed down the computer to allow backwards compatibility with older software and games!
Here's where I heard that, anyways: https://youtu.be/p2q02Bxtqds?si=f-inplPWdxMnwwu8
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.
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.
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.
Are you around 40 years old? If not you probably never had a computer with a turbo button.
Yeah man, I googled something that was on old computers so I can pretend to be middle age for those sweet sweet up votes that aren't even tracked...
Surely that's the more obvious reason than people that old are on Lemmy.