// Delay for(int i = 0; i <= 10000; i++) { // Do nothing }
This was a bad way of putting delays in the game / program.
I remember when I was young, getting about 10 386 computers and mounting them on the wall of my bedroom (being young and obcessed with star trek, I wanted to turn my room into a borg cube) .. I wrote programs that used the parallel port to flash big arrays LED's on and off. Being young, I didn't know how to do timing properly on these machines so I used FOR loops like the one above for delays ... the Turbo button allowed me to half the speed of the faster machines while running the same code on all of them.
p.s. The unfortunate side effect of putting 'tight' loops of code in your program as delays meant that the processors got very hot very quickly (this was back when processors didn't necessarily have fans on them). I ended up being ordered to de-construct my borg bedroom when the wallpaper set fire after a chip got hot!
Huh? you had 10 computers? why? how?
I had great fun with those machines ... including daisy chaining them all up COM1 -> COM2 -> COM1 -> COM2 and writing a chess program in C to have the machines play games against each other ... took me YEARS to do, but great fun and learnt heaps.
Suddenly my plane was going fast enough to fly over Syria 2 times a second.
But of course, for very good reason: it allows the computer to remain on for 10 hours instead of 10 minutes. Power saving is a big deal these days, but back in the 386 days, nobody cared (and 4.77MHz processors were not exactly power-hungry either).
It's fairly common practise to make 1 high spec version of a chip and then lock parts of it to make the budget versions.
For example, the AMD Phenom "Toliman" (X3) and "Kuma" (X2) CPUs are just "Agena" (X4) chips with 1 or 2 cores disabled. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Phenom_microprocess...)
When the X4 chips are manufactured they are tested, and if a core fails any tests it is just locked and sold as an X3/2. This increases manufacturing yields by making use of some of the failures. Of course as there is also higher demand for the lower-middle spec CPUs, sometimes perfectly working chips are restricted to meet the supply requirements for each market space.
And of course, often the different clock speeds are really just the same chips with locked multipliers.
I believe Sony followed a similar procedure for the PS3 cell CPUs - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_%28microprocessor%29#Comme...
Completely unplayable on anything faster than a 386/66MHz unless you have superhuman reactions.
Also, completely unrelated, but the processor in the computer you are using right now is very probably presently running at less than half of it's maximum speed.