These shutdown splashes are one reason why I enjoy working with AT motherboards, those with the old P8 + P9 power connector ("red to red and it's dead").
There's some charm and nostalgia in the computer only having two states - on and off. No standby power, no S1-S4 states, no wake-on-LAN, no management engine, etc. Press the power button - hopefully a chunky rocker switch - and the system is off (minus the RTC battery).
I have an XP machine running on such a motherboard and it too supports the "safe to shutdown" splash. Hibernate also works, so if I really want to, I can put it to "sleep" with no power at all.
> Press the power button - hopefully a chunky rocker switch - and the system is off (minus the RTC battery).
My favorite part of this era were those under-monitor power switch gadgets, so you could just leave the AT power switch on as well as the printer, monitor, modem, etc. and have one master power switch that turned everything on or off.
I still have an early '90s IBM PS/1 that was my family's first computer. The only accessories that survived from then are the CH Flightstick and Gravis Gamepad, the original keyboard, mouse, and monitor are long gone (I really regret not having the wonderful original clacky IBM keyboard), but it still works and still boots off its original 129MB hard drive.
If I find one of those power switch things at Goodwill or whatever I'll pick it up without a second thought.
In hindsight, that almost certainly answers something kid me always wondered about. My grandparents' computer desk had the ceiling-mounted track lights on their switch box's "Aux 2" switch with nothing on "Aux 1". If I recall correctly Aux 1 did in fact flicker, so that very likely is the reason the lights were on aux 2.
I wonder if one forcefully disables all ACPI support and drivers, are they allowed to go back to the binary ON/OFF lifestyle on a modern x86 system? What does Windows do?
I think so - but it would be fun to confirm. Windows up to and including XP still have the AT shutdown splash baked in. I think the splash was dropped with Vista. I did successfully boot Vista on a real AT-style motherboard but I don't recall how the shutdown looked.
One can install Windows 98 without ACPI by running setup with the "/pi" switch, alternative one can uninstall the "ACPI PC" device and replace it with "Standard PC" which should disable ACPI. This should cause it to show the shutdown splash even on ATX systems.
It loaded for me, but here's a description for future readers.
The first image is the of the original IBM PC's power supply (or a clone) wherein there's a nice, clunky red switch directly on the power supply.
The second image is of a later AT style power supply where the switch was moved to the front of the chassis/facade. To facilitate this, it runs a pair of wires carrying mains power to the front of the case, which the switch (usually clunky, due to the current) physically toggles mains power into the motherboard.
IBM's own AT used the same style with the switch on the PSU itself (that image I posted is for one), and I have an unbranded AT clone (486 era) with the same style. That "AT with separate mains switch" style was probably an interim design that was used for tower cases before ATX showed up.
They weren't always. I had a Pentium 1 machine with a push toggle switch wired to the front. It had big beefy wires in a plastic sheath, it was definitely mains.
No idea why they are doing it, but I can say that on upgrading an old Windows machine, I discovered their financial software was completely non-functional and no windows emulation mode on the executable would work. I ended up running it in virtualbox in "seamless" mode in ubuntu+wine set to autolaunch the software... plus a windows share. For some reason that worked with no issues. The alternative would have been purchasing a half dozen upgrades and going through them one by one, with repeated database upgrades, for software that was working fine.
Probably not too much risk if the XP machine is isolated.
There could also be licensing issues with upgrading, as well as unmaintained proprietary software.
Sure! I mostly use it for testing and finding the latest versions of software that still run without requiring SSE2 instructions (Athlon64, Pentium 4, etc.).
It's kind of like a functioning software museum - it has lots of old software and editors I used in the XP days, some games from around 2001, and some programming tools like Visual Studio/Basic, Perl, Python, Mingw/GitBash, Sublime Text, Ruby, etc. The only lang I haven't been able to run so far is NodeJS since it required SSE2 instructions very early on.
It has a 1300MHz Pentium 3 and 384MB of RAM, but with a PCI SATA controller and a modern SSD, it's pretty speedy and capable!
I once worked at a job that had a couple dusty old Windows 98 machines, because it was the last version of Windows supported by the control software for their expensive machine.
There's some charm and nostalgia in the computer only having two states - on and off. No standby power, no S1-S4 states, no wake-on-LAN, no management engine, etc. Press the power button - hopefully a chunky rocker switch - and the system is off (minus the RTC battery).
I have an XP machine running on such a motherboard and it too supports the "safe to shutdown" splash. Hibernate also works, so if I really want to, I can put it to "sleep" with no power at all.