Emulators and Turbo Buttons

[vadsamoht]

I was wondering what people think of using turbo buttons when emulating games (for those not familiar with them, turbo buttons basically act as a series of rapid button presses so long as the turbo button is pressed).


I normally try to avoid using them simply because it feels like cheating if you can shoot/jump/whatever faster or more consistently than you would be able to do on your own. For example, in most 2D shooters you would just be able to hold the turbo shoot button down and run forwards, killing everything in sight.


That said, I normally make exceptions when there is no actual advantage to be gained - e.g. powering through extensive passages of text or some other repetetive task where the outcome is known, just tedious to reach.


Any thoughts? Do people use turbo buttons more extensively?

 

[Fzero]

I never do, I used to have a turbo switch on one of my old controllers, i think for the megadrive, but never really bothered with them to be honest.


I dont think i had any games which wouldve benefited though, that may have been why


I remember using that turbo switch more for sabotage on my opponent --- in that, for example if we were playing a racing game, id lean over and flip his turbo switch on and it resulted in his car driving in little 'blips', like a frame skip glitch or something.


Vague memory of using it on my fav Magical Hat Flying Turbo Adventures, which i think was also pretty pointless, you'd just be jumping and loooong hovering all the time - If you know the game you know how a repeat of jump button results in the hovering.


So never really something i used, although i did have a gamepad with the feature


it is cheating though in my book

 

[vadsamoht]

it is cheating though in my book

I think it'd be quite hard to argue otherwise, but a lot of people *do* cheat - as can be demonstrated by a quick play on the multiplayer of certain well-known games.

 

[WizardStan]

I cheat often and don't see a problem with it. Different people want different things out of their games. Some people don't mind failing a level over and over until they can play it perfectly blindfolded, some people enjoy sneaking around for hours picking off enemies slowly, other people want to enable god mode and just get on with the game already.


Some games I enjoy the challenge and won't even think about reaching for cheat codes; other games become so monotonous that I couldn't keep playing without them.


Anecdotally, I've been playing Oblivion for a while and built up a character that would sneak, shoot with a bow from a distance, and basically have anything dead before it got close enough, running backwards and continuing to shoot until it was dead. This even worked for small groups, I'd just keep running around in circles until they were dead. Then I went to Oblivion: small chambers with strong monsters many of which could outrun me. I could not defeat them. A lot of saving, attempting to sneak around, getting caught, reloading, retrying, sniping, healing, slowly making progress, finally I was like "screw this, `tgm".


Anywho, yeah, turbo buttons are cheating by every definition I can think of, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

 

[SNESFAN]

i put turbo buttons in the same catagory as savestates, cheat codes I think are a little different and even worse are gameshark/gamegenie codes.


but I see no problem with useing them because... you're the one playing the game, if you want to play to finish, or you want to play to play ... it's all up to you on how you get through your game.


I prefer skill, it's more satisfying when you get to the end

 

[Fzero]

Yeah im same, i like the fact that games have cheats built into them even if i dont use them all the time .... i used to rock the infinite shuriken in Revenge of Shinobi all the time, blatant cheat.

 

[Prometheus]

Don't even think about using auto-fire, or he'll know.

 

[Exophase]

TG16 had turbo buttons on its standard controllers, so I like to think it's not cheating there. Nonetheless, PC-Engine didn't, so the games probably weren't designed with it in mind.

 

[Xaeo]

I never really found a good use for the turbo buttons, except for a few mini-games where I had to madly spam a button or two.


But, when I hear turbo and emulation in the same sentence I tend to think of the frame skip (though I'm not sure if that is what it actually does) for snes emulators. Where you hold down a button and you can speed through lengthy scenes twice as fast. That would be my favourite button for emulation, I miss it everytime I emulate a psx or N64 console. Though, with them being as touchy as they are, I can understand why that would be not as high on they're list to implement.

 

[Fzero]

haha nice, i dont remember that, the first MGSolid game on PlayStation had me hooked, a great game, that and Tenchu will be joys to pick up again on the Pandora.


Anyway what happens if he finds out you use autofire, does anything happen... does he really know?

 

[Prometheus]

Anyway what happens if he finds out you use autofire, does anything happen... does he really know?

Yes! He does! It's been some years, but if my memory serves me correctly, the game actually contained code to detect button presses that were impossibly fast for a human to do. I would imagine, though, that it wouldn't have been possible to account for humans like Toshiyuki Takahashi, who is so fast that he can press a button sixteen times in a second.


If memory serves (and again, it's been some years since I've played Metal Gear Solid, and I only tried this once, just to see what happened), Ocelot will kill you if you try to cheat.

 

[Exophase]

Don't even think about using auto-fire, or he'll know.

Did a Metal Gear Solid game really use "You're" instead of "Your"?

 

[KK25]

TG16 had turbo buttons on its standard controllers, so I like to think it's not cheating there. Nonetheless, PC-Engine didn't, so the games probably weren't designed with it in mind.

The very first PC Engine didn't have turbo buttons, but all the later hardware revisions did - Core Grafx, Core Grafx II, Duo etc...


I use the turbo option when playing some vertical / side scrolling shoot-em-ups. A lot of games just keep shooting as long as you keep the button held down anyway, but for the ones that don't, I turn the turbo on. I don't think it's cheating... It just gets tedious hammering the same button for 30 minutes straight!