The legal position
Where GenX-DOS stands, and why, in one place. The detail lives in ATTRIBUTION, LICENSE and REMOVAL; this page is the reasoning that connects them. It is a statement of position, not legal advice.
What it rests on
GenX-DOS is a one-person, non-commercial preservation project. It is a static site: no server code, no accounts, no payments, no advertising, no sponsorship, no analytics and no telemetry. Nothing about it earns money, and there is no mechanism by which it could without being rebuilt.
Since 11/09/2026 its two public surfaces hold different things:
| Surface | What is there |
|---|---|
| genx-dos.fun | The whole site: the emulators, and the games, BIOS and firmware they run |
| The GitHub repository | Code, documentation and artwork only — no games, and no firmware we supplied, in the working tree, the history, or the release zip |
That split is deliberate. A concern about content belongs where the content is, and cannot take the code, the documentation or the project's history with it.
The two licences on original work
Original material is CC BY-NC 4.0, except the emulator-facing glue —
systems/_shared/genx-*.js, systems/_shared-ejs/genx-*.js and each bundle's
play.html — which is GPL-3.0-or-later. Fifty files carry an SPDX header
saying which.
The split exists because those glue files drive GPL engines in the same browser context, so they are best treated as part of a combined work with them. The GPL forbids further restrictions, and NonCommercial is a further restriction, so the glue is GPL and the conflict disappears at the one point it arises. Everything worth protecting — the menu trees, the POST animation, the writing, the artwork, the instruction pages — stays NonCommercial.
One inherited obligation, and the reason the list above does not say the
prompt: the DOS terminal, the virtual filesystem and the font system are the
LGR terminal framework, written by Mike for LGR — Lazy Game Reviews. They are
not ours to license, they are excluded from both licences above, and a clear
credit to LGR must survive in any derivative. COMMAND.COM prints that credit
at the prompt, and the site's own favicon has carried it from the start: its
six frames cross-fade between C:\ and LGR.
Third-party code
Every engine, core and library here is someone else's work, under its own terms — GPL-2.0, GPL-3.0, MIT, BSD-2-Clause, zlib, Artistic-2.0 — and ATTRIBUTION is the canonical record. Every binary we ship names its corresponding source, so the GPL's offer is met by a link rather than a request; our three forks are public, with their changes described in prose; no upstream code is relicensed, and vendored code is kept byte-faithful.
Two cores are non-commercial-only: MAME 2003-Plus, under the classic MAME 0.78 terms, and Genesis Plus GX. They suit the project as it is — and they are a hard constraint on it ever becoming commercial. CC BY-NC draws the same line.
Games, BIOS and firmware
The site serves several hundred home-computer and console titles, a hundred arcade romsets, and the manufacturer BIOS and firmware images some machines need to start. None of it is in the repository, its history, or the release zip, and we publish no guidance on where to find any of it.
Where there is permission, it is named: GCE Vectrex, under Smith Engineering's standing non-commercial permission; LDOS 5.3.1, under Roy Soltoff's grant, with the notice retained; Attack of the PETSCII Robots, as its author's shareware release; public-domain and homebrew type-ins, and free reimplementations such as AltirraOS where those are what we ship.
Where there is none — the several hundred commercial titles, the arcade romsets, the manufacturer firmware — the position is preservation and personal use: machines 30 to 45 years out of production, software long out of commerce. That is a justification, not a permission, and we would not pretend otherwise. A rights holder who objects is within their rights, and the answer is not to argue but to remove it. Several of the publishers represented here still license their catalogues actively, and that is understood rather than overlooked.
What that rests on in practice: the project is non-commercial in fact and by licence; removal is promised on request, at a deliberately low bar, from a link on every page; and there are no directory listings and no sourcing guidance.
Sound and artwork
The one sound effect, the arcade coin drop, is licensed for this project — bought from its vendor — so it is used by right rather than on any preservation basis.
Bezel photography, wallpapers and screen art are not attribution-tracked as a matter of policy, with one exception that carries a share-alike obligation and is credited in the page that uses it. That is a known gap rather than a considered position, and the removal promise covers artwork like everything else.
Removal upon request
If you hold rights in anything here, or represent someone who does, it comes down as soon as the request is read — not debated, not defended, not delayed pending a formal process. A request needs three things: who you are, your standing, and what and why. No notice format, no legal citations, no documents.
Email admin@genx-dos.fun. No account is needed anywhere, and a few sentences are enough. REMOVAL is the whole procedure, including what we can and cannot reach.
Trade marks and naming
Machine, publisher and game names are used descriptively, to identify the software a page is about. No endorsement, affiliation or authorisation is claimed or implied, and no logo is used as a badge of origin for this project. The project's own name is GenX-DOS; the terminal it derives from is credited to LGR.
Personal data
None is collected. No accounts, no cookies, no analytics, no telemetry, and every served page carries a Content-Security-Policy that blocks off-site requests at source. What the site stores lives only in your own browser — save states, the Model 100's battery RAM, emulator settings, in-game cartridge saves, and one 20-byte arcade input config — and Your-Data is the complete list of each and when it is written. The web host keeps its own access logs, which we neither read nor use.
Known gaps
Stated because a position that only lists its strengths is not a position.
- Nothing tells search engines to stay out of the game directories, and nothing invites them in either.
- Graphics attribution is policy-free apart from the one share-alike item above.
- No lawyer has read any of this. For a hobby project that is a reasonable place to stop; it is worth saying that it is where we have stopped.