The first time I learned about "frames" was in talk about how Street Fighter 2 works. Keep in mind this game is ancient by today's standards. With the Street Fighter 2 cabinet, the hardware there focused on exactly one thing: Running Street Fighter 2. This meant the game could make some assumptions about its operation, namely its timing. Street Fighter 2 plays at 30 frames per second, meaning the screen redraws itself 30 times a second. Each cycle between the redraw is a "frame". During this time, the game does all of its computations. It copies pixels around, computes distances, does hit box checks, etc all in this tight little loop. Since frames in Street Fighter 2 are fixed to this 30 times per second, that means you have about 33 milliseconds to do all of your computations. Any smarts that are in the game have to fit in this time period. If that's the case, you can count on each frame being 33 milliseconds long, and you can derive timing in the animation system, what your grace period is to throw a fireball, or chain together some combo, or whatever. But the problem is this is a lie. It's just an infrequent one for Street Fighter.

Remember Solitaire? That game that came built into Windows 3.x back when you had to clean mouse balls? Yeah that one. I think it's still in Windows today. If you beat Solitaire, you were given a wonderful little animation of the cards cascading out of their slots, kind of undoing everything you just did. You could easily go use the bathroom and come back to see it still going. This thing took a while. At the time if you were on Windows 3.x and you had a 66 Mhz computer, this would go pretty slow. Once you got a Pentium, you'd notice the animation completed in about a second or two. In both situations, the game was doing the animation as fast as possible, but one computer was significantly faster than the other. Computers back then often had a turbo button. You could use this button to slow your computer down and run older applications that had this kind of timing problem. Street Fighter would be one of those applications.