[The Fifth Horseman]

Originally Posted by mckenziehaut

1. Apart from the US Copyright Office, where can I research and find exactly who owns the copyrights to some of these older games?

It's never quite precise, I'm afraid. We tend to collect information from Wikipedia and Mobygames and try to link it together into something comprehensive (see this), but it's never a 100%.
USPTO's trademark registry can provide some information on past and current ownership of associated trademarks, assuming that the owners have registered them and keep renewing them http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/gate.exe?...003:leeoum.1.1
Also, don't forget two caveats:
1. Copyrights and publication rights are two different things. You may find that the publication rights reside with an entirely different company than the copyrights to the game itself.
2. Anything licensed from a pre-existing IP will ALSO require a new license from the IP owners to be ported or remade.

3. What game companies do you know of that have brought an old Dos or windows game back to life on the IOS platform?

The Logic Factory has done that with Ascendancy. Mobygames shows a larger list of titles: https://www.google.com/search?num=10...om/game/&pws=0

4. What software out there is made directly for this type of project? Are there development kits or open source code available for creating this type of project? Basically anything apart from having a coder write the IOS compatibility from total scratch?

You're asking about two very different things here.
1. Remaking the games for iOS
2. Running the existing code on iOS

Remaking the games means effectively recreating them from scratch as iOS native applications. Even if you had access to the original source (assuming it survived all those years in the first place), you would still have to port it to the platform in question. The upside is that you would be able to enhance the game content or make changes to it (including adding new features).
Obviously, at that point the question presents itself whether licensing the original is worth anything at all, or would it be easier to make your game a spiritual successor modelled after the original's gameplay but with your own IP, name and content.

Running the existing binaries on iOS is not directly possible. There are ways around that - emulators could be used as basis for "wrappers" around the original programs - DOSPad and iphone-DOSBox for iOS, aDOSBox and ax86 for Android (I'm familiar with ax86 author's previous product, and it seems the emulation code can be licensed from him). Obviously, you will have to license the emulator code, and such ports cannot be enhanced - you're stuck with the way the original game looked and sounded, low-res sprites and all.

Ports that rely on some of the original game's content are somewhere in between the above two.

5. What communities or websites out there connect game programmers, designers and artists with each other in order to give new Indie Companies the ability to start off on the right foot?

Two I can think of is http://forums.tigsource.com and http://www.gamedev.net