this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
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Back in those early days many applications didn't have proper timing, they basically just ran as fast as they could. That was fine on an 8mhz cpu as you probably just wanted stuff to run as fast as I could (we weren't listening to music or watching videos back then). When CPUs got faster (or it could be that it started running at a multiple of the base clock speed) then stuff was suddenly happening TOO fast. The turbo button was a way to slow down the clock speed by some amount to make legacy applications run how it was supposed to run.
Most turbo buttons never worked for that purpose, though, they were still way too fast Like, even ignoring other advances such as better IPC (or rather CPI back in those days) you don't get to an 8MHz 8086 by halving the clock speed of a 50MHz 486. You get to 25MHz. And practically all games past that 8086 stuff was written with proper timing code because devs knew perfectly well that they're writing for more than one CPU. Also there's software to do the same job but more precisely and flexibly.
It probably worked fine for the original PC-AT or something when running PC-XT programs (how would I know our first family box was a 386) but after that it was pointless. Then it hung on for years, then it vanished.