Samuel Axon
After a 14-year journey of varying availability and utility amidst the changing policies of Apple’s App Store approval process, the MS-DOS game emulator iDOS is now available. behind On iPhone and iPad. We hope this app will still be available this time.
iDOS lets you run applications designed for MS-DOS via DOSBox, with a nice old-fashioned interface. Its main use case is certainly to run DOS games, but it’s had a rough road to get to that point. Originally released over a decade ago, it’s been quietly around for its niche audience, though it’s seen a few changes that have made it more or less useful as developers try to avoid being removed from the App Store after violating Apple’s rules. This culminated in its complete removal in 2021 after a few tweets and articles brought attention to it.
But earlier this year, Apple made a major change to its App Store rules, officially allowing retro game emulators for the first time. That paved the way for a wave of console-based game emulators like Delta and RetroArch, which mostly work as you’d expect on any other platform now. But when iDOS developer Chaoji Li and other classic PC emulators tried to do the same thing for old PC games for MS-DOS and other non-console computing platforms, they were frustrated. Apple told them that it didn’t consider their apps to be retro console game emulators and that they were violating rules meant to prevent people from circumventing the App Store by running apps from other sources.
PC emulator UTM released a version of its software that bypassed Apple’s rules, but it was a subpar experience. But on August 2nd, Apple changed its App Store rules to explicitly allow classic PC game emulators. That opened the door for iDOS, which has made a triumphant return and is working very well.
Developer Chaoji Li’s advertisement The appearance of iDOS 3 was not accompanied by a note of triumph, but rather more of exhaustion, given the difficulties the application had faced over the years:
It’s been a long time since we’ve had common sense prevail at Apple. As much as I want to celebrate, I can’t help but be a little cautious about the future. Are we okay going forward?
I hope iDOS can now enjoy its role in survival and growth.
Note: Although words may seem inadequate at times, I would like to thank the supporters of iDOS. You keep iDOS alive in so many ways.
Since Apple’s policy changes were driven by regulatory concerns, they’re likely to stick this time around, but after all that’s happened, you can’t blame Lee for putting a question mark on this one.
However, if you are one of the dozens (or maybe several hundred) people looking to play Commander Kane, Might and Magic: The World of Zen, Wolfenstein 3Dor Forest Generation On your iPhone, today is your day.
