Will It Work? Niles Mitchell Does iDOS

We’ve written a lot about Niles Mitchell and his fun Will It Work? channel on YouTube. Mitchell is an expert at getting old technology to work with the latest and greatest from Apple. The latest thing? iDOS.

To quote Niles, “I’ve been messing around with the iDOS application from the App Store. It’s a DOS emulator that lets you side-load software from the Files app. I’m actually quite surprised that Apple approved this app. You can literally side-load thousands of DOS applications and games. It’s very unlike Apple to allow this!

So, it was designed for people to download software to the Files app, then side-load from there. Got me thinking about maybe using the original retail media that these games came on back in the day…like the actual floppy and CD-ROM that was sold in stores.”

The iDOS app only costs $4.99. Mitchell shows how to side-load your old media onto the device, although you may need to buy adapters and drives to do this. Call me a nerd, but I would love to get my hands on an original Microsoft Multiplan spreadsheet disk and run that app on an iPad Pro…

The result was this wonderful YouTube video showing how Niles was able to load DOS games from the original media (floppies!) and play them on an iPhone.

If you’ve been reminiscing about your favorite game or app from childhood (or early adulthood, in my case), here’s a great chance to run it again — on your iPhone or iPad.