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Bring your own content

Ash Nazg is the runtime. Your software is yours. The project deliberately ships zero proprietary binaries, ROMs, BIOS files, fonts, or operating system images. That keeps the licensing story uncomplicated for the project; it puts the licensing story for what you run on you.

This page is the friendly version of that boundary. The normative version is specs/sandbox/spec.md → Requirement: No bundled non-open-source content.

What does not ship with Ash Nazg

  • Microsoft Windows (any version, including 3.x install media, registry hives, or system fonts).
  • DOS itself — MS-DOS, PC-DOS, IBM-DOS, etc.
  • Console BIOS files for any platform that a future engine might emulate.
  • Game ROMs — commercial or otherwise.
  • Commercial business applications — old or new.
  • Proprietary fonts that ride along with retro install media.

If you need any of the above to run a binary, you supply it from a source you have a legal right to use. Ash Nazg's job is to give it a place to run; sourcing it is yours.

What you can legitimately bring

Three categories cover most demo-worthy use cases:

  1. Software you bought a licence for. A legacy invoicing app you still have the floppies and key for. A DOS-era utility your employer paid for once and which is now business-critical for a handful of records-retention reasons. A copy of Windows 3.11 from the era when you bought it new.
  2. Open source software. FreeDOS, FreeBASIC, OpenWatcom — all legitimate, all permissive enough to redistribute. Plenty of useful old utilities have been re-released under MIT / BSD / GPL by their authors. Use those.
  3. Homebrew / fan-made software. Indie developers continue to target DOS and Windows 3.x today, often releasing freely. Same for emulator scenes.

The boundary that matters is do you have the right to run this binary. Ash Nazg can't tell. You can.

What's in the grey zone

"Abandonware" is a real cultural concept and a thin legal one. A publisher who hasn't sold a thirty-year-old game in two decades still owns the copyright. Sites that distribute that software without permission are infringing — that's true of the site, not necessarily of you if you can show ownership of the original. But "I'll just download it from there" is not the same thing.

The project does not endorse, link to, or ship from grey-zone archives. If you're running grey-zone software in your own Nextcloud, that's your call and your risk. We don't help and we don't gatekeep; we just don't redistribute.

How to convert your own install media

The detail here is intentionally high-level — step-by-step walkthroughs belong in docs/user-guide.md once the demo flow is working end-to-end. The shape is:

  • Floppy or CD images. Most retro install media is preserved as .img, .iso, or .imd files. DOSBox-X mounts these directly; you upload one to Files, run the binary that requires it, and DOSBox-X picks it up via your engine session config.
  • Original installation discs you still have physical copies of. Make a clean disk image with a tool like dd or ddrescue on Linux, or any reputable imager on Windows. Verify the image checksum against a public hash database if one exists. Upload the resulting image to Files.
  • Windows 3.x. Same deal — image your install floppies, drop them into Files, point DOSBox-X at the install entry point on the first disk. Once installed in a DOSBox-X disk, you save the hard-disk image back to Files and Ash Nazg runs that on next invocation.
  • Save games and config. Persistence is the WebDAV mount at /mnt/files. Anything written to that path lives in your Nextcloud Files; anything written to /tmp is gone when the session ends. Plan accordingly.

Why we draw the line this way

Two reasons:

  1. It matches reality. Ash Nazg has no business shipping a thirty-year-old corporation's installer. We're a runtime, not a distributor.
  2. It keeps the project's compliance story trivial. AGPL-3.0 plus only OSI-approved upstreams = no licence audit headaches, no re-distribution disputes, no need to stop accepting contributions because someone added a roms/ folder.

The trade-off is friction — you have to bring your own software. That's deliberate. Anyone for whom that's a blocker is not the target audience for v1.

TL;DR

Ash Nazg is the runtime; your software is yours. Bring it, run it, keep it inside your own Nextcloud. We don't ship it, mirror it, link to it, or check it.