Cassiel -
In the interests of clarity
I must disagree with the following statement
"If/when images have been converted there were valid reasons for it."
The original reason for TOSEC was to document/identify/rename images that were available so that people could happily scan a directory of files and everyone would have the same file identified the same (hopefully correctly). That's one of the reasons there are so many (h)(o)(a) versions in most of the dats.
Move on a few years and as the ISO project is prooving (at least in my opinion) the main reason for tosec now shouldn't just be about identifying everything out there but actively identifying and renaming good images and by good images I don't only mean bit perfect dumps of C64 Tapes etc but also the working images of titles that have been hacked by the release groups and had an intro/trainer tacked onto the program.
There were/is some exceptional programming carried out by the hacker/release groups and I do like to see them (probably because I'm getting old and can look back fondly to the days of being a trader on the C64).
With reference to the ADF/DMS issue not being a good example I could have quoted other examples and in some cases working images that could have been played in an emulator were removed from dats because of format changes when no other versions of the software were available to include in the dat.
Other examples would be scapping all the speccy TAP images because the TZX format is more accurate, or scapping the ADF format because the IFO format better represents the data on the disk.
If we are honest enough about this then most people collecting the tosec sets aren't ever going to convert the images back into a format to play on the original systems, there is a chance that they may load something up in an emulator and with a bit of luck it may spark an interest in them.
I must admit I agree that there are no weird systems just lots of "very interesting systems" quite a few of which are in my Loft
