DOS Emulator In and Out of App Store 338
Posted
by
CmdrTaco
from the going-for-hte-record dept.
from the going-for-hte-record dept.
gent01 writes "A company called Fast Intelligence got DOSBox running on iOS and dubbed it iDOS. It's been stuck in review for the app store for some time. Evidently the iDOS app was in the app store this morning, but it has already been taken down."
Well, duh. (Score:5, Informative)
This proves the previous story... (Score:2, Informative)
Apple [slashdot.org] leans very far to the left.
Re:Newsworthy? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Newsworthy? (Score:1, Informative)
Dosbox is to MS Dos as VisualBoyAdvance is to people walking around handing out free Gameboys.
There's also a FreeDOS implementation which is an actual OS and not just an emulator, which also isn't Microsoft's property.
id Software and Activision have distributed Dosbox in the past without permission from Microsoft.
Kindly cease and desist your baseless claims.
It's available for Android (Score:5, Informative)
As "aDosBox".. http://androiddosbox.appspot.com/ [appspot.com]
GPL3 (Score:5, Informative)
It's actually GPL3 code that can't be used in any apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad due to the anti-Tivoization clauses in GPL3 and the completely locked down nature of iOS and the app store.
Re:Newsworthy? (Score:5, Informative)
DOSBox is a reverse-engineered re-implementation of the PC BIOS (int13h et al) and DOS APIs (int21h et al) and the x86 CPU. There's no Microsoft, Digital Research, IBM or whatever code in there. At all.
Re:This proves the previous story... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Well, duh. (Score:1, Informative)
Unless things have changed in the last week that C64 emulator doesn't have any way to save the programs on it.
Re:News? (Score:1, Informative)
If you have to ask why, you're not a member of the intended audience.
[That answer borrowed from the Text-Mode Quake site.]
Re:Well, duh. (Score:5, Informative)
I hate to break the news to you friend but BfW basically did an end run around the GPL by having the main developers license to Apple under different restrictions. There is still some stink over this since not all the contributors agreed. you can read more here [lwn.net] but I would say since the FSF wrote the GPL if they say it ain't compatible then it ain't, period. Considering the whole basis of the GPL is the four freedoms, which you simply can't have because Apple uses both hardware and legalese to restrict what you can do with the code, I just don't see the two coming to any real agreement.
Either you have to own ALL the code so you can re-license it in a more restricted form as MYSQL used to do, or you simply can't play in Steve's garden. Personally I don't care for the walled garden approach but if that is your thing, enjoy. But logical hoop jumping won't make a walled garden into a free commons, nor will it make an Apple iDevice compatible with the four freedoms.
Re:Aw. (Score:3, Informative)
oh and the signing keys required to access sensitive API's costs 20 bucks, one time per developer.
Re:reason why: (Score:1, Informative)
Commodore 64 emulator was let in after the BASIC interpreter was removed, time passes then over the summer the developers were told they could add the interpreter again. it's still in the app store happily interpreting BASIC.
There's also a Lua interpreter in the app store by the way.
Re:I could have run cygwin! (Score:3, Informative)
No, you couldn't. Cygwin's always required Windows.
You may be thinking of DJGPP, which was (is) a port of gcc to 32-bit DOS (via DPMI) and also a collection of GNU utilities compiled with same. The utilities are occasionally updated.