There are few things on the App Store (Short of maybe Edge [$4.99 / Free].) that have as much drama surrounding them as Manomio’s C64 [$4.99]. All the way back in June we originally reported on its existence along with the sad news that the fully licensed emulator was rejected by Apple for violating the terms of the SDK regarding installing and launching executable code.
In September, the C64 emulator was finally approved by Apple, and available for a short period of time. Just a few days later, it was pulled from the App Store because the BASIC interpreter included was not removed, only disabled, and reactivating it was extremely simple.
Manomio once again submitted an updated version of the emulator to the App Store, and it was finally approved this afternoon. Aside from (hopefully) removing all the things that Apple didn’t like, it also sports up to a 30% performance improvement, onboard instructions for each of the included games, and three new games: International Basketball, International Baseball, and International Tennis.
[ Full HD version | Low Bandwidth version ]
Following its initial rejection, we did a full hands-on preview, and aside from the improvements and changes mentioned above the emulator seems quite similar to its original release. Since C64 has had such a torrid history of being pulled from the App Store and then taking months to reappear, if you’ve been waiting to grab this fully featured emulator, I wouldn’t hesitate for long.
App Store Link: C64, $4.99
