My biggest criticism of Exodos is that while it is from the original media, it is not the original media itself. They modify games for easy launching, often throwing away the installation files and other setup stuff.
I prefer the philosophy of “TDC”, the Total DOS Collection, which in most cases is simply the original install media in a zip file.
Even better is to create a kryoflux image, as that is not only disk format agnostic, but pretty much the most faithful digital preservation method we have right now.
> The Kryoflux company claims ownership of all images created with Kryoflux hardware.
From the links provided, the issue is regarding documentation of the image “flux” file format and the availability of software tools to manipulate the images. Jason Scott probably doesn’t want to use a proprietary format for archival of disk images, and that’s fine. For someone to say that Kyroflux is claiming ownership of images created by its customers, however, is just misleading.
Coming in late to say that Jason Scott has explained to me that at some point in the not so far past the way the copyrights were set up it DID give them total control but it's been changed to be still obnoxious but not quite as bad.
That's bad if true. bdowling points out that this only concerns the format itself, which while very different from "owns all images", could still be detrimental to preservation.
I think the answer then would be to come up with an alternative that works on approximately the same level.
Even if their claim is legally dubious, they may be inclined to try to legally enforce it through a lawsuit. Defending a lawsuit is an expense, hassle and risk that many people would rather avoid. That's why many would prefer to choose other products whose vendors don't even try to impose these kinds of conditions.
A file copy of the contents is not a preservation of the original media in its entirety. There might not even be any "files" to copy, depending on the platform (many Amiga games would bypass having a filesystem entirely and access data in a raw, direct manner).
Working with disk images allows recovering "deleted" contents, or otherwise recovering data from "slack space" (say, if a file was edited and shortened, the data after the new end of the file in the final sector is likely still present).
Also occasionally the original floppies contain interesting information in the unallocated space of the FAT filesystem – remnants of deleted files left over from the development process.
> Striving to find original media rather than using scene rips.
Wow, this is a weird point of pride. So, you’re making a new scene rip? Better to just give everyone an image of original media along with some patches if you want.
I prefer the philosophy of “TDC”, the Total DOS Collection, which in most cases is simply the original install media in a zip file.