For a brief, wonderful four hour period yesterday evening, iOS gamers were able to download iDOS, a working DOS emulator for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch that not only allowed you to run vintage DOS games and applications in full Retina Display resolution and replete with sound, but could even handle Windows 3.0.
By all accounts, iDOS — which was based on the popular DosBox emulator — was amazing, and Touch Arcade reports that it happily ran everything from vintage Sierra adventure titles to Blizzard’s Warcraft II to disc-images of the multimedia horror game 7th Guest.
Don’t bother trying to download iDOS now, though: Apple quickly yanked it. No one’s really sure why, although Apple has traditionally frowned on emulators before… but 9to5Mac has a really good theory: it seems iDOS allowed users to access the entire iOS filesystem, no jailbreak required, albeit without write access.
Part of me hopes that was the problem: it seems like an easy fix to close that hole up. I’d like the opportunity to play around with iDOS. My instinct, though, is that Apple took a stronger disliking to it that will prevent it from re-entering the App Store no matter what changes the developers make.
