It's to be expected, when you reset a PC, it goes back to its POST sequence (Power-On Self-test) all over again as of you power-cycled it.

Early microcomputers had very primitive POST that did not take much time.
Superboard II and PET 2001, the first microcomputers I played with more than 40 years ago, had practically insta-POST.
The original Apple II even dropped you in the monitor ROM, with no POST or initialization at all. Even the video RAM was not cleared.
But never saw a countdown 😉 This must be from a movie I guess.

l33ch wrote:

Another thing that contributed to that was the time it took to change to another game, because just like the spectrum you had to wait. In the Spectrum you had to wait for the loading time from the k7, in the PC for the reset time. Do you remember having tho wait for the PC to reset?

Are you talking about a PC Booter game?

Well, we had both Booters and non-Booters. Some we would load ms-dos on one of the 5'' floppy drives and then the game on the other floppy drive.
I was only 8yo so... but I remember wanting to change to another game and hitting crt-alt-del and having to wait a couple minutes before the PC started the reset process, i.e., before POST.
Don't know how to explain this better: you were in a session (dont't remember if in the Booter or in the prompt) and you would press the keys to reset, and in the monitor, even before it would start to reset or reboot, it would say something like "The system will restart in 12m03s. Please wait." <- the countdown I was talking about. I remember we as kids would go catch some cartoons on tv and every other minute check on the PC to see if we could load another game.

Was Space Commanders a booter game?

There are two versions of SC, the first in color and the second monochrome, though they both require CGA to work.

Has anyone found out who "AJF" was?

I don't have any memory of reset taking that long time. My family's first PC was an XT with 768kB of RAM and green display.

What would take so long to shut down, if not some operating system saving settings etc., but still - several minutes?

Errius wrote:

Was Space Commanders a booter game?

There are two versions of SC, the first in color and the second monochrome, though they both require CGA to work.

It was launched from the command prompt (SC.exe). I can remember it using both of the CGA palettes but I don't remember if it changed automatically between levels or if there was a key code to make it switch.

I don't know why any system of that age would require such a long time to prepare to reboot.

H3nrik V! wrote:

I don't have any memory of reset taking that long time. My family's first PC was an XT with 768kB of RAM and green display.

What would take so long to shut down, if not some operating system saving settings etc., but still - several minutes?

But did you get the message "The system will restart in ... Please Wait." even if the countdown was only like seconds? Maybe I'm remembering it wrong. What could cause such message to appear when hitting crt-alt-del?

The ZX Spectrum was and is brilliant!

Not a helpful or informative post, I know, but it still had to be said! 😀

About SC , very shortly the monitor got substituted (as the pc - another story) so I can like 98% sure the first level was cyan magenta and the second green and orange, and so on and so forth, alternated automatically.

Kerr Avon wrote:

The ZX Spectrum was and is brilliant!

Not a helpful or informative post, I know, but it still had to be said! 😀

Nothing like the first love LOAD " "

l33ch wrote:

But did you get the message "The system will restart in ... Please Wait." even if the countdown was only like seconds? Maybe I'm remembering it wrong. What could cause such message to appear when hitting crt-alt-del?

I have never seen such a message on any PC of any brand, at least not on DOS. I have zero experience with OS/2, but could it have been part of that? I know early versions of OS/2 were text-only and could run some DOS programs, and it would have run on PC. The only time I've ever seen a timer similar to what you mention is on Windows 2000 and XP when certain internet viruses were becoming more prolific and forcing the computer to restart themselves as part of their payload.

What about parking heads?

Parking heads is practically instantaneous.

I thought this thread was going to be about the time/date shown after a system has lost RTC power. Did you know that January 1st, 1980 was a Tuesday?

I do recall seeing some kind of "please wait" message after hitting CTRL+ALT+DEL. Could be caused by SMARTDRV having to flush its write buffer to disk.

l33ch wrote:

It showed a countdown even telling how many minutes and seconds until the PC was available again to your commands.
Did this happened with other systems? I seem to remember 4 minutes to reset the IBM PC?

I only remember old arcade machines do that, it even played a melody while literally warming up the 'bubble' memory.

bakemono wrote:

I thought this thread was going to be about the time/date shown after a system has lost RTC power. Did you know that January 1st, 1980 was a Tuesday?

I do recall seeing some kind of "please wait" message after hitting CTRL+ALT+DEL. Could be caused by SMARTDRV having to flush its write buffer to disk.

How could I not know that? 🤣

SMARTDRV you say? Could this happen even without HDD? going to follow this trail. Thanks a bunch.

This could be it. In November 1988 Microsoft releases MS-DOS 4.01, including the user shell and EMS support.[372] Also, support for hard disk partitions up to 2 GB, and the SmartDrive disk caching program.

I have never, ever in my life seen something similar while doing a soft-reset on a PC. Judging by the answers here I'd say that this applies for others too.
So I'll take a very long shot on this: could it be some "parenting" thing, something intentionally running (for example in autoexec.bat catching alt+ctrl+del) to reduce playing time/impose breaks? We're talking about a lot of minutes here, not a couple of seconds. Although I must admit I'm not aware of such software neither.

^This reminds me of socalled nag screens in shareware software.
Such software was feature complete, but did show a countdown during loading or exiting.

So maybe some sort of driver or TSR was running in the background ?
The 386 emulator "EMU386" for 286 PCs also has such a countdown thingy.
But it is installed in config.sys and only does this when DOS is booting.