You can simulate the functionality (and partly the look too) by right clicking in each of the axial, sagittal and coronal image windows and select "Image Display." That will turn off the menus on the bottom and right, slider and the color bar and leave just the image in its own window with title captions (sorry). The crosshairs are still there and interactive. Move and size each of the image windows to where you would like them to be placed on the screen. Using the Datamode, Misc menu save the layout as something like "orthoviewer.startup_script". You can then start afni with
afni -layout "orthoviewer.startup_script" &
and get most of what you want I think. Resizing would still require multiple moves and stretches, and there would be the window title captions on each.
