The return of the turbo button

Example: Old software that can't handle larger-than-expected disk free space. There are AppCompat shims in Windows for lying to applications re: free disk space quantity because some old applications stored the result of disk free queries in 32-bit integers. Who would ever have more than 4GB of free disk?!?

The integer overflows that result invariably cause unexpected behavior.

Just make the API call to write to the disk. If that returns "disk full" let the user know. Don't "check" first.

The problem with that was that the processor frequency to high/medium/low-performance class mapping was being done based on Pentium 4 clock speeds, so if you were using an AMD processor (or even one of the first generations of Intel's own Core i-processors if you still happened to be playing those games a few years later) with a lower clock speed but higher IPCs (so a roughly equivalent performance), those games would mistakenly assume your processor was slow and disable various graphics effects and other settings.

Somewhat annoyingly, Maxis/EA never fixed that issue even though AMD processors weren't totally obscure even at that time, either.

The saving grace was that at least things weren't totally hard-coded – there was a rules file in a plain text-based format controlling the various things that should be enabled or disabled based on the detected performance level, and so it was comparatively easy to just change the expected clock speed levels to something more reasonable for a non-Pentium 4 processor.

Later this was also helpful because the GPU detection started having its own issues a few years down the line: When AMD started recycling model numbers for its graphics cards, some newer models were then being mis-identified as some slow, older model that would require various workarounds/lower graphics settings, so again you had to manually edit the rules to fix things.

Hi. Author here.

Yes, I do occasionally use Excel (although I favour LibreOffice for most things these days.) TBH, though, this is I think the first time I have ever heard of anyone wanting this behaviour. Usually I heard about people who couldn't understand why they were no longer able to scroll around their spreadsheet in the usual way.

I'm vaguely glad to learn that someone somewhere does want this!

(Next we can discuss whether a "Mustang" is a kind of horse, a two-door sports car, a four-door electric crossover, or...)

But I do use it. It's a great key for toggling screen recording, because it's right next to Print Screen and makes logical sense in terms of positioning. It also doesn't do anything useful, or didn't.

Obviously it's not a real problem, but you can't really assume people don't work buttons into their workflow that aren't normally used.

Later models obviously ran faster, but that broke the TV out feature. It seems bad to sell people a newer, more expensive model that loses a popular feature. So, a TV back-compat button was put in so you could still use your TV in cases where you really need to. Technically, you didn't lose the feature when you upgraded.

Also, some games were written with the assumption of a fixed 4.77Mhz clock and would run unplayably fast on newer machines. The back-compat button would slow the machine down so you could still play last-year's games.

But "NTSC Backwards Compatibility Button" is not a sexy name for a feature. So, some genius labeled it the "Turbo Button" even though it actually slowed down the machine.

Once the early machines had it, all the later machines had to have it too. For a long time it simply cut the clock rate in half. Eventually, it did nothing and was abandoned soon after.

The difference was usually quite noticeable.

I did use it on some older games which just ran too fast on the 286 with Turbo on.