Commodore and Apple: Late love with obstacles

C64iPhone is a full C64 emulator, that is even officially licenced from Commodore Gaming. You can play all the vintage games with it. It comes initially with five games at the moment. So here’s the website. But there is more to this story.

I was wondering, why nobody else did this thing before, C64 on the iPhone. It seems, that several people tried to do a port of the Frodo-emulator for the iPhone SDK sufware emulator – just for the fun of doing it. According to reports form Touch Arcade and Pocket Gamer a developer from Manomio also worked on this project, but later rejected it because
a) there the licences from Commodore were unclear and
b) the terms of the iPhone store would not allow a project like this.
But the itch under the fingernails stayed.

So he went to Commodore and Kiloo and began clearing the rights. He also contected Apple right away, if an emulation-project like this would be possible to release on some future day. The got really exited at Apple and confirmed the project. And here we are now.

And you know what? Apple rejected the app!

It seems, that Manomio will have to remove the BASIC-interpreter in the app and make this whole thing only possible for emulating games. What is the coder in you now saying? Buhu. Why is licensing-stuff an obstacle for expressing creative code? I call this a major fail (at least from the Apple iPhone policy).

This here is the official statement form Apple, that were send with the rejection:

Thank you for submitting C64 1.0 to the App Store. We’ve reviewed C64 1.0 and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store because it violates the iPhone SDK Agreement; “3.3.2 An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s).”

So let’s wait what will happen to this project. The last word isn’t spoken yet.

Update: There is also another version, that say, that the App was rejected, because the ROM-Files (the games actually) are interpreted the be “Emulator App”, and not this official iPhone API. So this is the rule from the iPhone SDK agreement I quoted above. Really lame, but there seem to be also a lot of other apps live on the App Store, like apps, that play .SID-files, that would be also break this rule. Let’s still wait for new developments.

Update: The C64-iPhone got approval by apple!

Update 2: The day after the app got unapproved again, but today (11-11) it should be available again. Slowly also more and more games are being ported to the C64 on iPhone.