Commodore 64 Emulator Available on Apple’s App Store

A few months ago, many people decided that they had enough of Apple’s App Store’s approval process, and what resulted was numerous complaints posted around the web on various blogs. The most notable was at Gizmodo, where the author raised many legitimate concerns and questions. In the end, Apple seemed somewhat selfish in deciding what can be allowed in the store, and if it’s not that, then usually the reason was still a little off.

When I posted the above-linked news article, there was one app in particular I couldn’t get out of my head… the Commodore 64 emulator. After all, it looked absolutely fantastic, and well polished, and hey, it offers old C64 games on the iPhone! What’s not to love about that? Sadly, Apple originally denied the app as its design allowed executable code to be run. Despite the code being ancient, it just couldn’t happen.

So, the developers did what they had to do to fix the situation, and for the most part, all they did was take out the command-line interpreter – meaning a more locked-down emulator. For those who had no interest in the CLI, you’ll have nothing to worry about, as the games will still run fine. And thanks to the in-app store menu, you’re able to download new games on the fly.

The app costs $4.99 and includes five games (Dragon’s Den, Le Mans, Jupiter Lander, Arctic Shipwreck and Jack Attack). Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to exist a list of games available for purchase, but hopefully one will be released soon. Either way, it’s great to see such a cool app finally make its way into the store… let’s just hope that this will pave the way for other PC/console game emulators.

It’s true, the wait is over and Commodore 64 for iPhone has been approved by Apple. The road was bumpy, but we remained persistent and made the changes Apple was looking for. Ultimately, BASIC has been removed for this release; however, we hope that working with Apple further will allow us to re-enable it. Despite it’s absence, BASIC is not our focus, ultimately fans of the C64 want games. To that end, we’re working on lots of additional titles that will be available as a separate free or paid download.