BASIC Interpreter Found in Commodore 64 iPhone App

Earlier this week, Manomio was sighing in relief after having its Commodore 64 approved in the iTunes App Store. By removing one of its coolest features – the BASIC interpreter –, Manomio was able to get the app in the hands of iPhone and iPod touch owners. However, as one user revealed, Manomio didn’t actually slice out the function, but rather just covered it.

Not long after the C64’s release on the App Store, the “easter egg” was revealed by a reader on The iPhone Blog, who immediately posted his findings. “[...] Reader Stooovie let us know you can still access [the BASIC Interpreter] by enabling ‘always show full keyboard,’ starting a game, paging over to the EXTRA keyboard, and then tapping RESET. Boom, dropped into BASIC with a ready-prompt...” the iPhone Blog post reads. Apple was soon notified of this, at which point the Mac maker proceeded with removing C64 from the App Store.

“Unfortunately Apple this night pulled the C64 App from the App Store,” Manomio later said, according to 9to5mac. “We had agreed with Apple to remove basic from the application, but as we believed it would be possible to convince Apple to let it in later on, we left it in the app to be activated remotely by us when we had ‘go’ from Apple,” the message continued. “Due to the extreme publicity the app has received over the weekend and the fact that several users found a way to enable the basic back, Apple decided to remove the app from App Store until we have solved the issue.”

“This is very frustrating as we had no intention of tricking basic into the app and the fix was done in a few minutes the moment we found out – a new version has been submitted to Apple, and we can only hope Apple will appreciate our efforts to apply the changes they need in order to put it back on,” Manomio concluded.