Disabling that pesky turbo button on my gamepad
Skip table of contentsI started playing a racing game again and the way I have my bindings bound for it, I would accidentally press the gimmicky turbo button which on this specific old gamepad of mine was right next to the d-pad. I wanted to somehow disable the turbo button and I didn’t realise until I disassembled the gamepad that a small piece of electrical tape was all I needed.
I hate turbo
On this particular gamepad holding turbo together with another button would activate the latter’s turbo mode and make it send many rapid presses as long as it is being kept held down.
You can imagine just how infuriating it is when playing a racing game and the turbo mode gets accidentally activated - suddenly my acceleration drops and the steering becomes all messed up. I then have to hold the clear button and click ALL of the buttons on the gamepad because I don’t know for which of the buttons I accidentally activated turbo mode on while in the midst of racing. Then I have to restart the whole race since it was sabotaged by my useless controller.
Physically disabling the turbo button without permanently damaging the device
I never found any use for the Turbo button, but I also didn’t want to do something that would break it permanently perchance I might need it someday in the future. After disassembling it I saw that the way all of the buttons on my gamepad worked was by having this dark-gray material that is attached to the physical buttons themselves touch the copper sensors (those little copper snakes) on the PCB board. Even the d-pad and the buttons on the right side of the controller that are both hidden under the visually different rubber parts work under the same principle.
All I needed was to stick a small piece of electrical tape on it and that completely disabled the button. In the future if I ever decide that I need the turbo button to work again all I would have to do would be to remove the tape and swab the contact with a little alcohol to clean off any remaining glue residue and it should work again.