Commodore 64 iPhone App Comes, Goes

By  |  Tuesday, September 8, 2009 at 7:37 am

Developer Manomio developed a fully-legal Commodore 64 emulator for the iPhone, struggled to get it approve by Apple, then succeeded when it disabled the BASIC interpreter. Except it didn’t. From Wired’s Gadget Lab blog:

In order to win Apple’s approval the developer Manomio pulled the BASIC interpreter form the application. It turns out that it was still in there and could be activated with a few keystrokes. It took all of a few minutes for Apple to hear about this and pull the application yet again. For a developer that went to such lengths to secure copyright permissions, this seems a bit dumb.

I can’t believe that there’s any drama associated with running an early 1980s BASIC interpreter on the iPhone in late 2009–can anyone explain to me a scenario under which sandboxed Commodore 64 BASIC could present dangers to iPhone users or to Apple? But if you wanna keep your app on the iPhone store, hiding a feature you’d told Apple you’d disabled as an Easter Egg does feel like an act that’s destined to backfire big-time. Wonder if Apple will simply approve the new de-BASICed version that Manomio says it’s re-resubmitted, or whether it ever penalizes developers for being sneaky?

 
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1 Comments For This Post

  1. Paul Warner Says:
    September 8th, 2009 at 10:36 am

    I wounder how Apple would react if all the developer’s went on strike, and would not return until Apple created some type of policy stating exactly what was allowed, and not allowed in the app store, and actually stuck with it?

2 Trackbacks For This Post

  1. Old Operating Systems Don’t Die… | Technologizer Says:
    September 17th, 2009 at 1:57 am

    […] submit a version with BASIC disabled–except you could turn it on again if you knew how. That led Apple to yank the app, which remains unavailable as I write this. Commodore founder Jack Tramiel liked to compare his […]

  2. iPhone App Store Flirts With an NES Emulator, Briefly | Technologizer Says:
    December 22nd, 2009 at 5:15 pm

    […] which lets you play classic Commodore 64 games, but it only found permanent footing on the iPhone after some drama involving the app’s BASIC interpreter and the ability to hack into it. More importantly, C64 […]