Green: is turbo! What is this…?

[deepthaw]

Bought a Spaceorb 360 to play around with on my old MS-DOS PC. It’s really for Descent but thought it’d be fun to give it a shot in a few other games. Loaded the drivers, fired up Doom 2 v1.9 and it worked as expected. Until I pressed the “D” button on the controller and this happened…

 

https://youtu.be/tL_Tu5_4Q6Y

 

(For those who don’t want to watch, I go rocketing down the hallway at far beyond normal speed while it prints a “green is turbo” message)

 

Is that a built in functionality in Doom for weird controllers? Was the driver doing this? Would this have worked in Deathmatch? In general — WTF?

Edited September 4, 2023 by deepthaw
URL

[Shepardus]

The "is turbo" message is displayed when someone moves faster than is possible with regular run commands. This is normally done with the -turbo parameter, but assuming you weren't using that, it's possible that your controller's drivers are using the external control driver feature of the DOS executable to provide those inputs.

[deepthaw]

Interesting. Can’t believe I’d never heard of this until now. It’s thirty years late, but I wonder if somebody could have used this to write better mouse drivers (sensitivity that doesn’t crash the game when it’s set high, disable forward/backwards movement, etc.)

[deepthaw]

and I guess I should dig through the Spaceorb software with a hex editor to verify then update the wiki.

Edited September 4, 2023 by deepthaw