DOS Emulator In and Out of App Store

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.

[pclminion]

Duh. By emulating DOS, you allow the user to run any DOS program they want. In other words, you make the device programmable. That's a no-no on the App store.

This proves the previous story...

[copponex]

Apple [slashdot.org] leans very far to the left.

Re:Newsworthy?

[Darkness404]

Yeah, and the BIOS is IBM's property which is why you can only buy IBM-made PCs....

Re:Newsworthy?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[LodCrappo]

As "aDosBox".. http://androiddosbox.appspot.com/ [appspot.com]

GPL3

[CritterNYC]

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?

[NotQuiteInsane]

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...

[hedwards]

That's because in the US it's considered acceptable to accuse a politician of being both fascist and socialist at the same time. Both sides when you get far enough are completely nuts, but try comparing Naziism with Soviet Communism. The difference is significant.

Re:Well, duh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless things have changed in the last week that C64 emulator doesn't have any way to save the programs on it.

Re:News?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have to ask why, you're not a member of the intended audience.

[That answer borrowed from the Text-Mode Quake site.]

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Aw.

[Lehk228]

get a blackberry, they don't restrict developers and encourage you to integrate your app with the standard blackberry apps and UI with their "super apps" initiative.

oh and the signing keys required to access sensitive API's costs 20 bucks, one time per developer.

Re:reason why:

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

[Nimey]

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.