iPhone ZX Spectrum emulator ZXGamer pulled from App Store

It was quite a surprise when the iPhone's first ZX Spectrum emulator crept out quietly onto the App Store, and as exciting as it was for all the retro gamers out there, ZXGamer wasn't met with a great deal of enthusiasm due to its lack of audio and slow running speed.

Though it was indicated as being iPhone 3GS specific, it's also been suggested that the emulator runs slower than an actual Spectrum, which hasn't gone down too will with Sir Clive's legions of iPhone-equipped followers.

Just as surprisingly, developer Roger Boesch has just voluntarily pulled his emulator from the App Store for reasons he says he's not currently willing to divulge.

"Because of one very destructive discussion, I’ve decided to remove ZXGamer from the App Store until Release 1.2, to avoid more malicious incriminations and senseless discussions," his blog reads. "I will not talk about that in more details, but will describe the entire story after the release of 1.2. But Apple itself has nothing to do with this decision."

There was a discussion over on LiveJournal, in which the ZXGamer has been dissected and compared to a Javascript adaptation – called JSSpeccy – of the popular FUSE emulator written by Philip Kendall; apparently with over 1,000 lines of identical code.

This in turn sparked quite a heated debate on the WorldofSpectrum forums, which goes into more detail about the similarities between FUSE (distributed under a GPL, though even if ZXGamer is based on Matt Westcott's JSSpeccy, apparently the nature of its distribution contravenes the public license) and ZXGamer.

However, Boesch remains adamant that ZXGamer is all his own work, and promises a much improved emulator in version 1.2, which will apparently resolve all performance problems, run on all devices and support the Spectrum 128K.

Your thoughts below, please.