Apple bans Commodore 64 emulator for the iPhone

San Francisco (CA) – Club Cupertino has reportedly banned a fully-licensed Commodore 64 emulator. The application – developed by Manomio – would have allowed nostalgic iPhone owners to play classic C64 games and even run Commodore BASIC.

“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 ” Apple stated in an official rejection notice obtained by Touch Arcade.

“[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),” added Apple.

It should be noted that Manomio had previously informed Apple Europe of its intention to develop the emulator. In addition, Apple’s App Store currently carries a number of similar applications, including programmable calculators and a Z-machine interpreter known as Frotz.

The C64 – introduced in 1982 – was a popular 8-bit home computer manufactured by Commodore International. The unit featured 64 kilobytes of RAM, along with advanced audio and video hardware.