Yanked C64 iPhone App Makes a Comeback

Soon after the C64’s release on the App Store, an “easter egg” was revealed by a reader on The iPhone Blog, who immediately posted his findings. It was the BASIC interpreter that, according to “Apple law,” is something that shouldn’t be an an iPhone app.

“[...] 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 said. 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.

TUAW has now given everyone the heads up saying that the C64 emulator is back in the App Store. According to the site’s description, it’s got the original sound and graphics, an auto-save feature, the option to play in fullscreen portrait or landscape... pretty much everything you’d expect from an emulator.

Download C64 for iPhone ($4.99)