Apple rejects a Commodore 64 emulating iPhone app that coulda been a contender

champIt’s happened again. Apple has officially rejected an app that at first blush seems harmless and fun. This time it’s a Commodore 64 emulator from Manomio that offered a realistic joystick and keyboard, portrait and landscape gaming, and a fully licensed C64 emulator code. It was all on the up and up. Apple seemed excited. But then Manomio got the dreaded rejection mail:

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 basically they ran afoul of the rule that says you can’t run your own code – or emulated C64 code – over the OS. Well heck, that seems fair?

But what about Golden Axe and Sonic, two games that essentially emulate old game ROMS… which is exactly like emulating C64 games except on the C64 you could potentially type in BASIC code.

This probably won’t end here. We’ll keep our eye on the story.