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Apple Pulls C64 Emulator From the App Store
Rob Hearn sends in a piece up at PocketGamer.co.uk on why Apple suddenly pulled Manomio's C64 emulator soon after finally approving it. (El Reg has coverage too.) "It was a glorious few moments for retro gamers when Manomio's C64 emulator was finally approved by Apple and released to the eager, nostalgic iPhone public. Then, calamity! It was gone again. Apparently some wily users figured out how to access the Commodore 64 BASIC system that was originally packaged with the emulator — something that Apple wasn't too happy with, given the nature of the interpreter's code. By setting the keyboard to 'always on,' launching a game and restarting BASIC, players got into the 'empty shell' of their C64 emulator."
it probably duplicates core functionality in the loosest sense of the term. I.E. turns it into a "computer" that people can then "use" to "get stuff done". Then BAM! duplicate functionality.
two words for you: "root access".
on Android you have to bend over backwards to gain it (unless there is a fsckup with text message editor, heh); on maemo its:
$ sudo gainroot
#
Android is almost as closed as iPhone...
Particularly one whose games all depend upon an interpreted language
C64 games typically were not written in BASIC, as the performance of BASIC sucked. Only the cheesiest type-it-in-yourself games were implemented this way.
Most games were written in 6510 assembly, which was a very simple label-abstraction above 6510 machine language. Basically, the "assembling" process just changed the commands, like 'JSR' (jump to subroutine) to their binary equivalents (in this case, 00010000), and made sure that all two-byte numbers were big-endian. So JSR $FFD2, the command to print a byte to the screen became (in decimal) 032 210 255.
Some assemblers were a little more advanced, with macros and the like so you could label a subroutine and it would substitute the appropriate register address, but I never believed in those. I edited my code directly to the bits, damn it!
The CB App. What's your 20?