My understanding is that the turbo button in old PCs wasn’t to make the computer go faster, but to underclock it to match what games expected. A physical compatibility mode button, essentially.
Fantasy Empires was the one for me. Regular game played fine, but 5 minute battles that I could play at realtime on a 486DX-66 were over in 1/10th of a second on a PC 10 years later.
This is kind of misleading though. It was common at the time for games to run as fast as possible and then break as CPUs got faster.
One famous example is Wing Commander which is unplayable on a Pentium-class machine because it runs too fast.
This is also why DOSBox has a speed setting and a keyboard shortcut to adjust it at runtime.
My understanding is that the turbo button in old PCs wasn’t to make the computer go faster, but to underclock it to match what games expected. A physical compatibility mode button, essentially.
Yes precisely. It typically made the PC run at 4.77MHz to match the original IBM PC. Back then Turbo meant 8 or 12 MHz, not much more…
A bunch of games have framerates locked now to prevent these issues
https://youtube.com/watch?v=7PpTiK1jYPw
Fps differences in cod 4
Fantasy Empires was the one for me. Regular game played fine, but 5 minute battles that I could play at realtime on a 486DX-66 were over in 1/10th of a second on a PC 10 years later.