“They really want their old DOS apps to continue to work for them on their iOS devices. “For years, we have been requested by thousands of users to enable iTunes file sharing,” he continued. In a message to Apple, Li argued that there is “no security risk since the user code is running inside emulator within the app sandbox.” “The new generation of computing is here, and it’s color is dystopia.” Battles with Apple “I feel genuinely terrible for you,” wrote one commenter on Li’s website when he announced the news. Now Apple has turned against it again, rejecting a bug-fix update because of an App Store rule that stops apps from installing or launching executable code. However, last year iDOS reemerged with new updates. This was due to restrictions that involved iTunes file sharing and bundled game files without ownership. The app was allowed back into the App Store in 2011, but wasn’t updated for a four-year stretch between October 2015 and September 2020. Since then, there have been continuing skirmishes with Apple. Sure it gave you a spike, but then you lost the ability to make it do useful things.” “When iDOS was first released in App Store, it was pulled off the second day it went viral,” Li said. IDOS was meant as an open-source project that allowed users - like him - to download and play the games they had grown up on. “My first PC a Win98 Pentium PC, so I played DOS games alongside games like StarCraft Tomb Raider. Photo: iDOS The days of DOSīefore he got into Apple devices, starting with the original iPhone, Li was a PC guy. It’s like being back in 1988, only without the acid-wash jeans. Well, that and making out like your fancy new iPhone is a computer from 1988. While emulation remains controversial from a legal perspective, in some cases it’s the only way gamers can play old titles without buying vintage hardware. That holds especially true for obscure titles that did not spawn franchises still bringing in cash in 2021. While a few of these games ( Doom, for example) can still be found in the App Store as official ports, many have fallen by the wayside. Think titles like Prince of Persia, Doom, Lemmings, Duke Nukem and Commander Keen. It even included mouse and keyboard emulation that worked impressively well.ĭOS, for those not old enough to remember it, was the command-line disk operating system central to the experience of owning and running games on a PC back in the 1980s and early ’90s. The app Li came up with, iDOS, allowed those with iOS devices to run old DOS games they downloaded. “People said that DOSBox (read: a free, open-source DOS emulator) too demanding for mobile devices, but I decided to give it a try and see how bad it. “The performance was quite impressive,”Li told Cult of Mac. Update August 9: 2021: As Li feared, iDOS 2 is now gone from the App Store.Īpple has removed iDOS 2 from AppStore, citing the same old 2.5.2.Ĭhaoji Li, a thirty-something app developer and stay-at-home dad living in southern China, started developing iDOS soon after picking up a first-gen iPad in 2010.
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