Relive Vintage Startup Sequences with The Restart Page
Do you long for the days when your Mac would start with a smiling Mac logo and a row of INITs along the bottom of the screen? Or perhaps you miss watching a NeXT machine perform its initial memory scan? Pine no more for the past, because The Restart Page will transport you there. Choose from 17 Restart dialogs belonging to vintage versions of the Mac OS, Windows, NeXT's OPENSTEP, ProDOS (on the Apple IIgs), a developer build of Rhapsody, and others. Some sequences even include the old startup chimes.
As a long-time Mac user and developer, I enjoy BootXChanger, which changes the gray Apple image shown when your computer first boots to whatever you like. It includes a number of classic Mac boot icons (plus the NeXT logo, and Clarus the Dogcow). My current favorite is the grayscale Happy Mac icon.
Free: http://namedfork.net/bootxchanger
This was fun until my cursor disappeared in Firefox 9.0.1 running on a Leopard iMac. Good thing I have Mouse Locator, which allowed me to put my invisible cursor over a non-Firefox window. The cursor came back when I clicked. Even then, the cursor disappeared again when I brought Firefox to the front. Can't remember which startup screen triggered this weird behavior. I know it wasn't a Windows one because I have NO nostalgia for Windows startup windows! :-)