7 ms·

Shumway: Flash implementation in JavaScript

90 points by cyborgx7 8y ago

cyborgx7 8y ago
Like pdf.js but for flash. Sadly it seems to be dead. I found this effort to port what there is to a webextension but there is no documentation how far that person got and the last commit was 3 months ago. https://github.com/ExE-Boss/mozilla-shumway/tree/web-extension/extension/webext https://github.com/ExE-Boss/mozilla-shumway/tree/web-extensi...
- nicoburns 8y ago
  Maybe if we're lucky, we'll get flash as a WASM module at some point. I believe adobe entrusted the flash player codebase to google, so it's not impossible. And it'd be great for security...
  - EamonnMR 8y ago
    Might try compiling GNU Gnash with Emscripten.
- asaph 8y ago
  Three months of no commits is not enough to declare a project dead. As for Shumway, looking at the commit history[0], the last commit was over 2 years ago. [0] https://github.com/mozilla/shumway/commits/master https://github.com/mozilla/shumway/commits/master
  - cyborgx7 8y ago
    I forgot to add the link to that porting effort, and I didn't mean to declare it dead, just status uncertain. https://github.com/ExE-Boss/mozilla-shumway/tree/web-extension/extension/webext https://github.com/ExE-Boss/mozilla-shumway/tree/web-extensi...
kbumsik 8y ago
This is officially in the Firefox Graveyard. [1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/describecomponents.cgi?product=Firefox%20Graveyard https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/describecomponents.cgi?product=...
- skrowl 8y ago
  Yep, it's abandoned. No commits since 29 Mar 2016.
jancsika 8y ago
Two questions: 1. Can it faithfully reproduce Flyguy? 2. Can it faithfully reproduce homestarrunner.com? When the answer to both is "yes," then Shumway has reached its goal and the devs can stop coding. :)
- superkuh 8y ago
  Unfortunately ... the system is down.
  - theandrewbailey 8y ago
    Have some technochoclate.
- Aardwolf 8y ago
  Imho: can it faithfully play most Flash games on Newgrounds?
armanini_io 8y ago
why?
- glassesman 8y ago
  There's a roughly 20 year history of games and animations built for Flash. It would be a shame to lose them indefinitely.
  - trothamel 8y ago
    I sometimes hope that Microsoft will release, for example, a Windows XP VM in an app. Perhaps a versions that's limited to connecting to the Internet Archive to play archived flash projects.
    - tracker1 8y ago
      Should be able to combine Flash Player an older Firefox, ReactOS, and v86 to accomplish what you want.
      - wyatt8740 8y ago
        You don't even need a windows clone for that since Adobe is still releasing linux binaries. Just use a relatively recent debian/ubuntu distro.
ape4 8y ago
Remember when getting a "free" (as in libre) version of Flash was a high priority. https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/ https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
shmerl 8y ago
Mozilla abandoned it, I suppose because it required too much effort to complete and they need to concentrate on Firefox.
actionscripted 8y ago
> Latest commit 16451d8 on Mar 29, 2016 I'm all for keeping old things around and that includes Flash stuff (look at my user name). But Shumway is super dead. I believe there are more active projects going you might want to check out if you're looking to keep Flash alive/around. Alternatives: * https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/otherversions/ https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/otherversions/ (yeah, still works!) * https://github.com/lightspark/lightspark https://github.com/lightspark/lightspark * https://wiki.debian.org/PepperFlashPlayer https://wiki.debian.org/PepperFlashPlayer
- nwah1 8y ago
  Also OpenFL and Apache Royale
Nelkins 8y ago
Looking forward to the Rust implementation, compiled to Web Assembly :)
tombert 8y ago
Stuff like this makes me wish Adobe had just open-sourced Flash. I hope this doesn't start a flame war, but I think that most of the crap that Flash gets stems from the fact that it's a proprietary plugin...if Adobe releases part-of or all of the source code, we conceivably could avoid losing history, and someone could write something that compiles to WebAssembly or something. I remember when Shumway was announced a few years ago, and I was excited that this might be the solution that everyone asked for, but I suspect the problem was a lot harder to solve than most people thought it would be (unsurprising...Flash has 20+ years of baggage in its codebase, who knows how many weird hacks have piled up).
- microcolonel 8y ago
  I agree, there is a lot of content tied up in Flash, and while some of it will never be possible without plugins or something of equivalent power (due to a requirement for direct network access/udp), the vast majority of historically important Flash content could be packaged with an in-browser runtime.
- mbebenita 8y ago
  As one of the main developers on the project I can say that yes, 20+ years of undocumented baggage made it a really hard problem to solve.
  - tombert 8y ago
    What was the process of reverse-engineering something like Flash? Did you simply do it by looking at the bytecode (or whatever it's called in Flash), or did you write something with the mainline compiler and work from there?
    - mbebenita 8y ago
      The bytecode for AVM2 is fairly well documented, and there is a test suite that you can compare against. We reached 99% compatibility with that, and were at times much faster than the Flash VM (simply benefiting from years of investment in JS engines). The hard part was understanding what the Flash player was doing, and the differences between all the different Flash Player and SWF File Format versions. Not to mention, re-implementing the rendering engine and the entire API surface of Flash, which was HUGE. We basically took existing content and tried to make sure Shumway did the same thing the Flash player did, wrote a regression test and repeated the process. To this day, I still don't understand exactly how the timeline worked (or was supposed to work). It's like a web page DOM, but you can jump back and forth in the timeline, it's wild. We certainly learned a lot working on Shumway. Firefox got a lot better, we stressed the JS engine and the graphics stack quite a bit, and had to make improvements all throughout the codebase to make Shumway possible. In a lot of ways, Flash was great. Its rendering engine was (and still is) quite impressive, and nothing has really replaced it yet.
hateful 8y ago
Flash will always be needed. How else will we view Zombo.com?
- Malic 8y ago
  I mostly agree - but just in case, there is https://html5zombo.com/ https://html5zombo.com/
vikbez 8y ago
I used this with great results: https://github.com/swf2js/swf2js https://github.com/swf2js/swf2js
- wyatt8740 8y ago
  It's pretty awesome, but it's lacking a few very important things. The first I noticed was that it has no support for saving and loading shared object libraries (SOL's), which are what pretty much every flash game used to save data between sessions. They're pretty much 'Flash cookies.' Also, it, like pretty much every other project except lightspark, doesn't seem to implement much of AVM2/ActionScript 3, which the "last generation" of flashes mostly used. Lightspark supports more of it, but still has severe rendering issues.
evincarofautumn 8y ago
I worked on a Flash implementation called Spaceport in 2012 or so. We had the most complete implementation apart from Adobe, with all kinds of goodies like actual hardware-accelerated graphics on mobile (far better than the buggy AIR). Tried to get Mozilla to buy us out, since they were looking for a way to incorporate an open Flash implementation more complete than Shumway, but they didn’t bite. Ended up acquihired by Facebook, product abandoned. I sometimes wonder, if things had gone differently, whether we could have given new life to the Flash ecosystem. Oh well.
- mmastrac 8y ago
  I was working for Nickelodeon on HTML5 gaming around that time and I think I remember seeing your product. You might have interacted with some of the same people I did! Does Facebook own your IP? Might be worth investigating whether you can loose it from where ever it lives. There will likely be a flash gaming revival over the next decade as all the kids try to revisit their childhood memories.
  - evincarofautumn 8y ago
    > Does Facebook own your IP? No, afaik it should still be owned by the startup incubator that was the parent company of Spaceport. We open-sourced some ancillary bits and pieces before leaving, but not the most important components of the platform like the ActionScript compiler, build system, Flash API implementation, and renderer/engine. I might try to get in touch with them, but open-sourcing it wouldn’t be enough—realistically it would take most of the old team just to get it back shipshape, let alone continue adding features, and I know most of them don’t have the time or desire to do that for free 5–6 years after leaving it behind.
ZenPsycho 8y ago
There have been forks and attempts at rewriting bits of it since it "died" https://github.com/ivanpopelyshev/shumway/commits/master https://github.com/ivanpopelyshev/shumway/commits/master there's also this thing https://github.com/open-flash/open-flash https://github.com/open-flash/open-flash Apparently the hard part is not the swf format, or the bytecode interpreter, or the action script language, it's the rendering engine, apis, and the vast number of bugs that content has over the years come to depend on and expect in order to work.

90 points by cyborgx7 8y ago

Like pdf.js but for flash. Sadly it seems to be dead. I found this effort to port what there is to a webextension but there is no documentation how far that person got and the last commit was 3 months ago. https://github.com/ExE-Boss/mozilla-shumway/tree/web-extension/extension/webext https://github.com/ExE-Boss/mozilla-shumway/tree/web-extensi...

nicoburns 8y ago
Maybe if we're lucky, we'll get flash as a WASM module at some point. I believe adobe entrusted the flash player codebase to google, so it's not impossible. And it'd be great for security...
- EamonnMR 8y ago
  Might try compiling GNU Gnash with Emscripten.
asaph 8y ago
Three months of no commits is not enough to declare a project dead. As for Shumway, looking at the commit history[0], the last commit was over 2 years ago. [0] https://github.com/mozilla/shumway/commits/master https://github.com/mozilla/shumway/commits/master
- cyborgx7 8y ago
  I forgot to add the link to that porting effort, and I didn't mean to declare it dead, just status uncertain. https://github.com/ExE-Boss/mozilla-shumway/tree/web-extension/extension/webext https://github.com/ExE-Boss/mozilla-shumway/tree/web-extensi...

kbumsik 8y ago

This is officially in the Firefox Graveyard. [1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/describecomponents.cgi?product=Firefox%20Graveyard https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/describecomponents.cgi?product=...

skrowl 8y ago
Yep, it's abandoned. No commits since 29 Mar 2016.

jancsika 8y ago

Two questions: 1. Can it faithfully reproduce Flyguy? 2. Can it faithfully reproduce homestarrunner.com? When the answer to both is "yes," then Shumway has reached its goal and the devs can stop coding. :)

superkuh 8y ago
Unfortunately ... the system is down.
- theandrewbailey 8y ago
  Have some technochoclate.
Aardwolf 8y ago
Imho: can it faithfully play most Flash games on Newgrounds?

armanini_io 8y ago

why?

glassesman 8y ago
There's a roughly 20 year history of games and animations built for Flash. It would be a shame to lose them indefinitely.
- trothamel 8y ago
  I sometimes hope that Microsoft will release, for example, a Windows XP VM in an app. Perhaps a versions that's limited to connecting to the Internet Archive to play archived flash projects.
  - tracker1 8y ago
    Should be able to combine Flash Player an older Firefox, ReactOS, and v86 to accomplish what you want.
    - wyatt8740 8y ago
      You don't even need a windows clone for that since Adobe is still releasing linux binaries. Just use a relatively recent debian/ubuntu distro.

ape4 8y ago

Remember when getting a "free" (as in libre) version of Flash was a high priority. https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/ https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/

shmerl 8y ago

Mozilla abandoned it, I suppose because it required too much effort to complete and they need to concentrate on Firefox.

actionscripted 8y ago

> Latest commit 16451d8 on Mar 29, 2016 I'm all for keeping old things around and that includes Flash stuff (look at my user name). But Shumway is super dead. I believe there are more active projects going you might want to check out if you're looking to keep Flash alive/around. Alternatives: * https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/otherversions/ https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/otherversions/ (yeah, still works!) * https://github.com/lightspark/lightspark https://github.com/lightspark/lightspark * https://wiki.debian.org/PepperFlashPlayer https://wiki.debian.org/PepperFlashPlayer

nwah1 8y ago
Also OpenFL and Apache Royale

Nelkins 8y ago

Looking forward to the Rust implementation, compiled to Web Assembly :)

tombert 8y ago

Stuff like this makes me wish Adobe had just open-sourced Flash. I hope this doesn't start a flame war, but I think that most of the crap that Flash gets stems from the fact that it's a proprietary plugin...if Adobe releases part-of or all of the source code, we conceivably could avoid losing history, and someone could write something that compiles to WebAssembly or something. I remember when Shumway was announced a few years ago, and I was excited that this might be the solution that everyone asked for, but I suspect the problem was a lot harder to solve than most people thought it would be (unsurprising...Flash has 20+ years of baggage in its codebase, who knows how many weird hacks have piled up).

microcolonel 8y ago
I agree, there is a lot of content tied up in Flash, and while some of it will never be possible without plugins or something of equivalent power (due to a requirement for direct network access/udp), the vast majority of historically important Flash content could be packaged with an in-browser runtime.
mbebenita 8y ago
As one of the main developers on the project I can say that yes, 20+ years of undocumented baggage made it a really hard problem to solve.
- tombert 8y ago
  What was the process of reverse-engineering something like Flash? Did you simply do it by looking at the bytecode (or whatever it's called in Flash), or did you write something with the mainline compiler and work from there?
  - mbebenita 8y ago
    The bytecode for AVM2 is fairly well documented, and there is a test suite that you can compare against. We reached 99% compatibility with that, and were at times much faster than the Flash VM (simply benefiting from years of investment in JS engines). The hard part was understanding what the Flash player was doing, and the differences between all the different Flash Player and SWF File Format versions. Not to mention, re-implementing the rendering engine and the entire API surface of Flash, which was HUGE. We basically took existing content and tried to make sure Shumway did the same thing the Flash player did, wrote a regression test and repeated the process. To this day, I still don't understand exactly how the timeline worked (or was supposed to work). It's like a web page DOM, but you can jump back and forth in the timeline, it's wild. We certainly learned a lot working on Shumway. Firefox got a lot better, we stressed the JS engine and the graphics stack quite a bit, and had to make improvements all throughout the codebase to make Shumway possible. In a lot of ways, Flash was great. Its rendering engine was (and still is) quite impressive, and nothing has really replaced it yet.

hateful 8y ago

Flash will always be needed. How else will we view Zombo.com?

Malic 8y ago
I mostly agree - but just in case, there is https://html5zombo.com/ https://html5zombo.com/

vikbez 8y ago

I used this with great results: https://github.com/swf2js/swf2js https://github.com/swf2js/swf2js

wyatt8740 8y ago
It's pretty awesome, but it's lacking a few very important things. The first I noticed was that it has no support for saving and loading shared object libraries (SOL's), which are what pretty much every flash game used to save data between sessions. They're pretty much 'Flash cookies.' Also, it, like pretty much every other project except lightspark, doesn't seem to implement much of AVM2/ActionScript 3, which the "last generation" of flashes mostly used. Lightspark supports more of it, but still has severe rendering issues.

evincarofautumn 8y ago

I worked on a Flash implementation called Spaceport in 2012 or so. We had the most complete implementation apart from Adobe, with all kinds of goodies like actual hardware-accelerated graphics on mobile (far better than the buggy AIR). Tried to get Mozilla to buy us out, since they were looking for a way to incorporate an open Flash implementation more complete than Shumway, but they didn’t bite. Ended up acquihired by Facebook, product abandoned. I sometimes wonder, if things had gone differently, whether we could have given new life to the Flash ecosystem. Oh well.

mmastrac 8y ago
I was working for Nickelodeon on HTML5 gaming around that time and I think I remember seeing your product. You might have interacted with some of the same people I did! Does Facebook own your IP? Might be worth investigating whether you can loose it from where ever it lives. There will likely be a flash gaming revival over the next decade as all the kids try to revisit their childhood memories.
- evincarofautumn 8y ago
  > Does Facebook own your IP? No, afaik it should still be owned by the startup incubator that was the parent company of Spaceport. We open-sourced some ancillary bits and pieces before leaving, but not the most important components of the platform like the ActionScript compiler, build system, Flash API implementation, and renderer/engine. I might try to get in touch with them, but open-sourcing it wouldn’t be enough—realistically it would take most of the old team just to get it back shipshape, let alone continue adding features, and I know most of them don’t have the time or desire to do that for free 5–6 years after leaving it behind.

ZenPsycho 8y ago

There have been forks and attempts at rewriting bits of it since it "died" https://github.com/ivanpopelyshev/shumway/commits/master https://github.com/ivanpopelyshev/shumway/commits/master there's also this thing https://github.com/open-flash/open-flash https://github.com/open-flash/open-flash Apparently the hard part is not the swf format, or the bytecode interpreter, or the action script language, it's the rendering engine, apis, and the vast number of bugs that content has over the years come to depend on and expect in order to work.