For a few glorious hours last October, iPhone and iPad owners could turn their devices into fully-functioning DOS emulators with iDOS, a $1 app. It was, of course, too good to be true, and Apple quickly removed the program.

Surprisingly, iDOS is back in the App Store, possibly for good, and now it’s free. The only major concession is the removal of file transfers through iTunes, which allowed users to load and install pretty much anything — even Windows 3.0.

But as TouchArcade points out, you can work around this roadblock by downloading iPhone Explorer on your PC and dropping files into the “/Apps/iDOS/documents” directory, which becomes the C: drive in iDOS. Hooray nostalgia!

If you managed to snag the old iDOS, there are a couple reasons to consider upgrading, even with direct file transfers removed. The new version adds a self-contained DOS game storefront, much like the download store in Manomio’s Commodore 64 app, along with a quick launcher that avoids the DOS prompt entirely. It includes the shareware versions of Duke Nukem and Wolfenstein, plus four other games. Everything’s free for now, but I wonder if developer FastIntelligence will try to license and sell some classic games through the store.

Even better, iDOS now has a virtual joystick and keypad, and supports Bluetooth keyboards.

I hope the discovery of iPhone Explorer doesn’t change Apple’s mind on letting iDOS exist. We’ll know for sure if the next “iPad is” commercial includes a snapshot of the command prompt.

Either I’m dreaming, someone in Cupertino messed up, or Apple has seriously relaxed the rules of what flies in the iOS App Store. For $1, you can now download iDOS, a DOS emulator for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.

Touch Arcade broke the news earlier today, and I initially figured it was a fluke, like the accidental approval of a Nintendo emulator last year. But for now, the app is still available, and I just downloaded it directly on my iPhone and from within iTunes. iDos includes two games, Ms. Pac-Man and Dig Dug, plus its own virtual keyboard and keypad instead of the stock iOS inputs. I tried Dig Dug on an iPhone 3GS, and it’s a little slow, but I’m hoping for better results when I try it on the iPad later today.

Already, people are gorging on classic PC nostalgia by loading their own applications (active forum threads on what works here and here). Some of the classic games confirmed to work are Duke Nukem, Commander Keen 4, Pinball Fantasies and Space Quest. But the crowning achievement is the installation of Windows 3.0, complete with Solitaire. Touch Arcade has the screenshots to prove it.

This is amazing stuff, and it makes me wonder where Apple will draw the line and/or how long the party will last. The company doesn’t have a strict policy against emulators — Commodore 64, Intellivision and ZX Spectrum are allowed — but launching executable code from within an application always seemed like a big no-no. That’s why NS Basic was never released in the App Store. Either iDOS does things in a way that satisfies Apple’s censors, or the app is just going unnoticed.

In any case, if you’re an old-school computer junkie, I’d get the app right now just to be safe. But I’m really hoping this is a new leaf turned for Apple, and that we can expect more emulators for iOS in the future.

A billion people may use Microsoft products, but until now, just about nobody has worn them. All that changes–maybe–starting December 15th, when the company’s retro-themed Softwear by Microsoft T-shirts hit the market. Including some designs by rapper Common, the line celebrates the much-missed era when floppy disks were actually floppy and 640KB did indeed feel like all the memory anybody would ever need. Here’s a little fashion show of the initial shirts, which come in four sizes: Basic, Home, Business, and Ultimate. (Kidding!)