You don’t necessarily know when someone will decide to do a commercial release of an old game, causing it to disappear from various abandonware sites. Much simpler to grab eXoDOS once and use it for life.

True, but when I installed ExoDOS I choose the option where it just downloads the descriptions, tagged metadata and a few screenshots per game with a searchable menu system. You can browse by name, genre, publisher, resolution etc, pick the game you want and it gets only the necessary files from the torrent (which, given the era, are very small). It's quick and seamless.

I keep minimal ExoDOS, MAME and RetroArch installs on my laptop so when I'm reading a retro article about some cool game I've never heard of (or only vaguely remember) it's easy to download the game files and give it a go. Frankly, retro emulation has gotten so incredible lately with upscaling, 4K texture packs, mods, decomps/recomps and fan translations of Japan-only titles - it's been 18 months since I played a game released in the last decade. Currently, I'm halfway through the best late-90s Japanese shmups. Next up I have 126 PS3/X360 titles curated from top ten lists on my backlog.