Following months of working with Apple to get its licensed Commodore 64 emulator onto the iPhone and iPod Touch's App Store, Manomio finally managed to get its app on the shop over the holiday weekend by removing a feature that allowed users to access BASIC programming functions, which violates the iPhone SDK agreement.

Despite the developer's efforts, users found a simple workaround enabling them to drop into BASIC and run their own code with the application. "We had agreed with Apple to remove BASIC from the application," says the studio.

"But as we believed it would be possible to convince Apple to let it in later on, we left it in the app to be activated remotely by us when we had 'go' from Apple."

Once news of the workaround reached Apple's ears, however, the iPhone company removed the Commodore 64 emulator from its store last night while Manomio fixes the issue. The developer maintains that this was not an intended Easter Egg.

"This is very frustrating as we had no intention of tricking basic into the app and the fix was done in a few minutes the moment we found out - a new version has been submitted to Apple, and we can only hope Apple will appreciate our efforts to apply the changes they need in order to put it back on."

You can see a demonstration of the Commodore 64 app and several games that haven't released for the emulator yet (the emulator so far includes Dragons Den, Le Mans, Jupiter Lander, Arctic Shipwreck and Jack Attack) below:

[Via The iPhone Blog]