14 ms·

Internet Archive expands Flash support

529 points by sogen 3y ago

temporallobe 3y ago
Great! Maybe now I can watch Stone Trek in all its original Flash animation glory!
vsnf 3y ago
I couldn't find any easily available official notice, but they seem to be using Ruffle[0] [0] https://ruffle.rs/ https://ruffle.rs/
- jazzyjackson 3y ago
  Well when you load an emulator on the archive there is a ruffle splash page before the animation starts, so a good bet!
  - textfiles 3y ago
    It's certainly a firm hint!
- lucgommans 3y ago
  Announcement: https://blog.archive.org/2020/11/19/flash-animations-live-forever-at-the-internet-archive/ https://blog.archive.org/2020/11/19/flash-animations-live-fo... > Utilizing an in-development Flash emulator called Ruffle, we have added Flash support to the Internet Archive’s Emularity system, letting a subset of Flash items play in the browser as if you had a Flash plugin installed I had trouble when adding e.g. https://archive.org/details/gravityrunner-nolimit https://archive.org/details/gravityrunner-nolimit because there's literally zero documentation on this system that I could find, but the way that it works is that you edit metadata tags (key-value list) and there is some magic/special tags that have an effect on how the item is displayed on the site, like whether to show you the emulator. What you need to set is: emulator = ruffle-swf emulator_ext = swf You can find out what others have set by clicking on 'show all' at the download options and choosing the <itemname>_meta.xml file.
  - db48x 3y ago
    If you prefer JSON you can also visit <https://archive.org/metadata/gravityrunner-nolimit https://archive.org/metadata/gravityrunner-nolimit>.
  - nosamu 3y ago
    The Flashpoint project has some great documentation here: https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/datahub/Uploading_SWFs_for_the_Internet_Archive https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/datahub/Uploading_SWFs_for...
haunter 3y ago
Highly recommend "Winnie the Pooh's Home Run Derby". It's the Dark Souls of flash games https://archive.org/details/homerunderby_en https://archive.org/details/homerunderby_en The japanese version is here (no difference) https://archive.org/details/homerun_20201126 https://archive.org/details/homerun_20201126 They might crash in full screen though (some kind of bug)
- 112233 3y ago
  The reviews on the english version archive.org entry are a piece of art, memorial for the victims and something else altogether. Have not seen such reviews on anything else, not even close.
- samketchup 3y ago
  I just struck out 5 times in a row, finally made solid contact and the game crashed. Thank you, lol
  - haunter 3y ago
    Try not to play fullscreen. Started crashing some months ago. Or download the sfw file and play with the standalone Ruffle.rs client
    - Bakingpotato 3y ago
      did you report that to the bug tracker?
      - haunter 3y ago
        Looks like someone already did!
    - adrian17 3y ago
      (Ruffle dev here) We took a look at `Home Run Derby` specifically and found some bugs and inefficiencies - the most recent builds should run faster and hopefully crash less :)
Bakingpotato 3y ago
huh, so the Ruffle technology is actually something to consider. Much better than the last 5+ years of flash 'alternatives' tried some games out, most look identical to FP somehow.
anticensor 3y ago
I misread as "Internet Explorer expands Flash support" for a moment.
NelsonMinar 3y ago
Compare with ooooooooo.ooo, recently discussed on Metafilter in great detail: https://www.metafilter.com/199981/Friday-Flash-Fun-Forever https://www.metafilter.com/199981/Friday-Flash-Fun-Forever
CSMastermind 3y ago
I was just watching a YouTube video about Home Star Runner yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wbh9-mNmviE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wbh9-mNmviE I never watched the series myself but I do remember hearing about it. In the video essay he talks about how flash videos like Home Star Runner were a unique medium. Not quite passive like a video but not quite interactive like a video game. The videos could be watched passively but also could incorporate interactive elements like minigames, easter eggs, and choose your own adventure stories. He points out that even when Netflix dipped into the choose your own adventure format they couldn't achieve the same flexibility as a flash animation because if for example they wanted to make a story change that would dye a character's hair blue they couldn't possibly film all the permutations scenes required to propagate that visual difference throughout the story. But in flash animation you can. You can easily let the audience choose a character's hair color and have that effect the animation for the rest of the story. The author of that YouTube video made me wish I could experience those cartoons and it makes me happy that places like the IA are making that possible.
- Bakingpotato 3y ago
  yeah, lots of Flash games were actually innovative. plenty of developers got their start on NG with flash before moving on to make console or steam games. flash had plenty of shovelware, but you can still make incredible stuff with it.
  - klenwell 3y ago
    Good example here: https://archive.org/details/thequestfortherest_flash https://archive.org/details/thequestfortherest_flash It works! It had been effectively defunct for years: https://amanita-design.net/thequestfortherest/ https://amanita-design.net/thequestfortherest/
    - Bakingpotato 3y ago
      good pick.
- TillE 3y ago
lucgommans 3y ago
They link to a collection called "Software Library: Flash". How do I add something there? I've uploaded gravityrunner years ago and recently (45 days ago, the site tells me) figured out how to activate the emulator for this swf file (not sure why not offer to emulate any .swf file but ok), but it's also not showing up¹ in things like Flash game collections. Is there any documentation on this? Edit: wait, I think I found it. Below the About text, there is a filter for "AND primary_collection:softwarelibrary_flash". Probably I need to add that tag to my item. Now I wonder how I'm supposed to know of the relevant collections to put things in? Is there a list of all software categories? ¹ https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash?query=gravityrunner https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash?query=grav... whereas it is on the site-wide search: https://archive.org/search?query=gravityrunner https://archive.org/search?query=gravityrunner
- Bakingpotato 3y ago
  not that I've seen. one thing you can try to do is add the Ruffle emulator flags to your metadata, and they'll probably pick it up and place it in that category whenever the next time they do a sweep. I guess you can also email them, hey are pretty prompt by email, usually.
- ehPReth 3y ago
  Try @textfiles on Twitter
Apocryphon 3y ago
Does this mean that previously archived sites that use Flash will now be viewable?
- lucgommans 3y ago
  That would be nice. I was recently trying to play https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/science/rock-paper-scissors.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/scie... via archive.org, but it doesn't work. Also the swf file itself does not load in an old virtual machine. I don't know where to view error output besides the JavaScript console; it simply does nothing. (Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2290936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2290936) I still occasionally think back to this engine when the topic of human randomness comes up (I do computer security for a living, so that's not infrequent)
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    Ruffle ships a browser extension that loads Ruffle into every tab you open, so Flash sites work as they were originally intended to. It's available for Chrome and Firefox. Safari works if you enable developer extensions and download our macOS app - we have to get into Mac App Store for it to work normally because apparently notarization isn't enough[0]. https://ruffle.rs/#downloads https://ruffle.rs/#downloads [0] It was enough for the old extensions API :/
    - lucgommans 3y ago
      Did that work on the NYT site for you? Because for me it doesn't seem to, but then I figure you're just replying in general and not about this rock-paper-scissors AI
      - kmeisthax 3y ago
        I did try on Ruffle, but it's a slightly older version, it's possible that either newer versions have a regression or you have a really old extension version.
justsomehnguy 3y ago
At some point Flash emulation would solve all the biggest troubles of the original Flash and.. became a new standard for a web-based inter/animation? Of course, having a VM with XP with Macrmedia director would be a problem for Apple M1/2/3 owners, but nothing a modern emulation couldn't solve...
- Bakingpotato 3y ago
  would it solve the problems? absolutely. would browser vendors pick it up for a standard? almost definitely not. though, nothing is stopping anyone from creating new flash games, videos, etc. the software is out there, and NG already does flash game jams.
  - justsomehnguy 3y ago
    Well, the modern CSS + animations + SVG solves like 90% of things Flash could do, with HTML5 and canvas it solves the remaining 9%. but the biggest problem is the authoring tools and I if there were anything worthwile enough the web would had exploded already.
    - rhn_mk1 3y ago
      I'm not sure if it's included in your 90%, but an advantage of Flash is that it was not JS or HTML. Meaning that you could block it easily, when it offended your senses (animated ads, autoplaying videos), without affecting the functionality of most web sites. CSS + animations + JS + HTML5 cannot be blocked without destroying the web site as well.
      - Bakingpotato 3y ago
        yeah I remember that people demonized flash so much for that and turned a blind eye once html and javascript was given that power. jokes on them now, I guess not to mention flash content could run on a potato, while javascript is soon to see your processor as fried as a potato chip instead
      - 3y ago
BenFranklin100 3y ago
This is encouraging news. These sorts of efforts help save information from being buried in the trash heap of history. Is anyone aware of coordinated efforts beyond the internet archive to save data in old formats and media? I actually have information on 5.25 floppies I never copied over (my bad) that are almost certainly lost at this point. Also, I have docs in PFS Write format that will be PITA to recover at this point too. I’d have to dig out that old 486 that has been gathering dust in my basement the last 25 years to know for sure :) .
- Bakingpotato 3y ago
  I don't know of too many, but there are some out there like https://hiddenpalace.org/ https://hiddenpalace.org/ (though that is more related to video games).
- xp84 3y ago
  Look for platform-specific sites. For instance, 80s Mac stuff has at least a couple, like Macintosh Garden.
Alifatisk 3y ago
Part of me feel sad that the big players deprecated flash before any good alternatives popped up, HTML5 wasn't exactly an alternative yet. Flash was waaay more powerful, I think we lost a bit of good technology there. Hopefully we'll get it back soon.
- Bakingpotato 3y ago
  yeah. the closest to getting flash back is Ruffle, which works pretty well, and Newgrounds does flash game jams still, so it ain't all dead
- em3rgent0rdr 3y ago
  Particularly for vector-based animated movies, can achieve much higher quality-per-bandwidth than compressed raster graphics, and are future-proofed to automatically handle higher video resolutions.
  - Bakingpotato 3y ago
    yeah, a lot of flash content that was SVG exclusive can go up past 4k and look stunning, and flash was the only one around then (and debatably, now) with an editor to let someone leverage that
  - xp84 3y ago
    This part itself is probably a lost art forever. As are many things that required great efficiency. Apart from a few embedded specialties. I feel the same pain though, watching a HomestarRunner video or something by means of a 200MB video when I know the SWFs were like 100KB.
    - Alifatisk 3y ago
      "watching a HomestarRunner video or something by means of a 200MB video when I know the SWFs were like 100KB." WOW
- justinclift 3y ago
  I'm also interested in seeing what happens with Ruffle can eventually play all (or say 99%) of the Flash files out there. Will they continue on, and make a "next generation flash" or something? aka Flash Done Right :)
dayvid 3y ago
Xiao Xiao was a nostalgia kick: https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash?query=xiao+xiao https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash?query=xiao...
- Bakingpotato 3y ago
  amen.
a1o 3y ago
Does anyone how to do this? I could tie existing wasm runtimes to some binaries that supports it (mostly old abandon ware games there that aren't flash), but when I asked around in forums no one answered there - or I didn't understood how their communities worked.
jonplackett 3y ago
The thing I still miss about Flash is the authoring tool. It is one of the few bits of software that bridged a gap between artists and creators and coding in a way that totally democratised creating interactive websites. I see some similarities with Instagram filters and TikTok effects. The visual-layout-you-can-add-code-to approach, but Flash was so mainstream and capable in a way filters aren’t. I wish Adobe had done a better job with flash and just converted the Flash Player into html5. Surely that could have been done? Website creation is far too complicated now compared to then and I think the level of experimentation - especially by lone artists - has plummeted since flash died.
- johannes1234321 3y ago
  Yes, I still haven't found a good alternative to easily build simple interactive animations for the web. Flash was fun, even with my limited artistic skills.
- LadyMartel 3y ago
  I fondly remember when I first discovered how to attach a goto action to a button and I went nuts with it making choose your own adventure type animations. Drawing was also really easy to make thing look decent even with a mouse. I haven't found (or admittedly looked for) a similar vector drawing tool like that ever since.
  - ftmch 3y ago
    Yes, the generated brush strokes were really good. I was at one point just making static comics in Flash, using just a mouse because the brush strokes looked like they were drawn by someone way more skilled than myself.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Bakingpotato 3y ago
  nah, HTML5 was and still isn't good enough for a straight conversion, as years of flash ""alternatives"" have shown us.
codethief 3y ago
So does that mean I get to play Winterbells and Yeti Sports again? :)
codedokode 3y ago
In case anyone is wondering how much CPU Flash emulator uses: "Isolated Web Co" - 12%, Firefox - 16%, gnome-shell - 25%.
nathants 3y ago
working on a game right now. the second to last attempt was in godot 4. it reminded me a lot of flash, especially in 2d mode. to anyone missing flash go checkout godot!
- hoten 3y ago
  PIXI.js also gives a similar framework.
  - andai 3y ago
    Have you used Phaser? I was under the impression that Pixi is just the graphics part, while Phaser (which uses Pixi) handles everything else.
    - hoten 3y ago
      I have not, so I'm not very familiar. PIXI provides Stage / DisplayObject / Sprite APIs that would be familiar to Flash programmers.
j4ah4n 3y ago
They certainly were fun days back with Macromedia at the helm. Full suite of tools that worked extremely well together. I remember when Tim Burton put out various cartoons via Director (the same used for countless DVDs) that opened up more dramatic storytelling than the business “intros” offered at the time (I built these too mind you). I was even Flash AS3 certified at one point, something I was very proud of in my early career. Good times.
- Bakingpotato 3y ago
  and then adobe spit on all of it. what a waste, and its all on adobe.
cempaka 3y ago
Went looking for a good old article about fanimutation, this is quite the walk down bored-college-dorm-session memory lane: https://www.austinchronicle.com/screens/2002-01-25/84480/ https://www.austinchronicle.com/screens/2002-01-25/84480/
willhackett 3y ago
This is pure nostalgia
- Propelloni 3y ago
  Agreed. We hated Flash back in the day. It was a terrible proprietary format, impossible to search, unstable and prone to crashes. It was even worse than JavaScript today. And it required a plugin. Obviously it did a lot of things right and we miss Flash for it. But it was almost universally despised in the early 2000s.
  - dmvdoug 3y ago
    I was wondering about this because my only memory of it is just how much people hated it. That and security problems.
winstonprivacy 3y ago
Relevant: https://archive.org/details/flash-is-dead https://archive.org/details/flash-is-dead
mikercampbell 3y ago
Pokémon Tower Defense??
diggernet 3y ago
Sadly, flOw still doesn't work. https://archive.org/details/flash_flow https://archive.org/details/flash_flow In fact, the motion of the little bit that it does feels much less smooth than I remember from last time I checked.
- justinclift 3y ago
  Just tried it here (using Firefox on Linux), and it seems to be running ok. At least, the creature is smoothly turning and travelling towards wherever the mouse is. There don't seem to be any stutters, slowness, or other hiccups.
  - diggernet 3y ago
    Thanks for checking. Same setup here. Feels a little jittery to me. I dunno, maybe it's in my head. Of course, the important bit is the poor little guy never gets any food to eat. So, no game.
    - justinclift 3y ago
      Yeah. I used to play Flow on the PS3, and thought it was awesome. :)
nineplay 3y ago
The orisinal games were one of my favorite things on the internet. I'm so happy to see them back. https://archive.org/details/chicken-wings https://archive.org/details/chicken-wings
WillAdams 3y ago
I hope this means that they will fix the site for the wonderful book _Bembo's Zoo_: https://web.archive.org/web/20050204004955/http://www.bemboszoo.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050204004955/http://www.bembos...
endgame 3y ago
Wow, there are a few animutations in their big "unsorted" collection: https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash_unsorted https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash_unsorted . Rewatching them brings back so many memories from High School.
phendrenad2 3y ago
I have a theory that Google killed flash so that they could index the web more effectively. There were many old websites that were entirely made in flash (or java applets), and the content that Google needed to scrape was buried inside a binary flash file. Flash had security vulnerabilities? News flash: So do javascript engines.
- Bakingpotato 3y ago
  while that might be true, its probably more true that they want to own the internet (see: nonstandard changes within chrome, forcibly making chromium dominant, the AMP debacle) and adobe SWF files aint google
- pests 3y ago
  They started to index flash software in 2008 and I even remember seeing flash in search results sometimes https://searchengineland.com/google-now-crawling-and-indexing-flash-content-14299 https://searchengineland.com/google-now-crawling-and-indexin...
lhball 3y ago
I had en elementary school teacher that made a website dedicated to flags games appropriate for students. It was amazing, FULL of games from my childhood: https://web.archive.org/web/20050407011006/www.gamewing.com https://web.archive.org/web/20050407011006/www.gamewing.com If they can get that working I’d be ecstatic!
- wiredbutburned 3y ago
  sweet!
slowhadoken 3y ago
Last time I checked BlueMaxima makes two flash emulators Flashpoint Ultimate and Flashpoint Infinity.
dumpsterdiver 3y ago
Possibly an unpopular opinion: Flash appears to have been a very capable medium for transporting intent, but the intent of that awesomeness was overshadowed by the shoddiness of the underlying implementation. Flash, in its various implementations, has always amounted "building a house upon sand". You don't have to search far to see this. It was an ignorantly thrown together security nightmare (ignorant in the sense that they had no idea how bad it actually was until the RCE's came raining down).
tagyro 3y ago
I have many fond memories of Flash. It was far from perfect, but it really brought together programming and art, to a level that I don't see today. Around 2005(?) I remember a Flash conference in Turin, Italy where I saw many great interactive CDs and games from artists from all around the world. Tokyoflash, Yugo Nakamura and many more creators that were building experiences which I have a hard time finding these days. In the latter years, there was FWA (Favourite Website Award) full of great flash websites (still remember GotMilk). And then came Flex and AIR, that made building "rich internet applications" fun. I left web development when Flash died and coming back to it now, after almost 20 years, and honestly, I don't think we're any better. Adobe being Adobe, never got to fix the security and performance of the Flash Player (a dedicated surfer can still find malware disguised as Flash Player).
romusha 3y ago
No reason to still use shitty technology
- DaSHacka 3y ago
  I agree, we should ditch JavaScript.
epa 3y ago
Im excited for this! So much is archived on flash that had thought to be lost
cantik88 3y ago
[dead]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
giovannibonetti 3y ago
Regarding a modern alternative to Flash, I just want to mention the Scrimba webdev learning platform [1], which leverages a custom built programming language [2] for making interactive courses and save the videos in an optimized vector format with a very small footprint. It was released in a Launch HN 3 years ago [3]. Personally, I have used the platform to teach the basics of frontend web dev to my wife, and it was a great experience. [1] https://scrimba.com/ https://scrimba.com/ [2] https://scrimba.com/learn/imba https://scrimba.com/learn/imba [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24579699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24579699

529 points by sogen 3y ago

Great! Maybe now I can watch Stone Trek in all its original Flash animation glory!

vsnf 3y ago

I couldn't find any easily available official notice, but they seem to be using Ruffle[0] [0] https://ruffle.rs/ https://ruffle.rs/

jazzyjackson 3y ago
Well when you load an emulator on the archive there is a ruffle splash page before the animation starts, so a good bet!
- textfiles 3y ago
  It's certainly a firm hint!
lucgommans 3y ago
Announcement: https://blog.archive.org/2020/11/19/flash-animations-live-forever-at-the-internet-archive/ https://blog.archive.org/2020/11/19/flash-animations-live-fo... > Utilizing an in-development Flash emulator called Ruffle, we have added Flash support to the Internet Archive’s Emularity system, letting a subset of Flash items play in the browser as if you had a Flash plugin installed I had trouble when adding e.g. https://archive.org/details/gravityrunner-nolimit https://archive.org/details/gravityrunner-nolimit because there's literally zero documentation on this system that I could find, but the way that it works is that you edit metadata tags (key-value list) and there is some magic/special tags that have an effect on how the item is displayed on the site, like whether to show you the emulator. What you need to set is: emulator = ruffle-swf emulator_ext = swf You can find out what others have set by clicking on 'show all' at the download options and choosing the <itemname>_meta.xml file.
- db48x 3y ago
  If you prefer JSON you can also visit <https://archive.org/metadata/gravityrunner-nolimit https://archive.org/metadata/gravityrunner-nolimit>.
- nosamu 3y ago
  The Flashpoint project has some great documentation here: https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/datahub/Uploading_SWFs_for_the_Internet_Archive https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/datahub/Uploading_SWFs_for...

haunter 3y ago

Highly recommend "Winnie the Pooh's Home Run Derby". It's the Dark Souls of flash games https://archive.org/details/homerunderby_en https://archive.org/details/homerunderby_en The japanese version is here (no difference) https://archive.org/details/homerun_20201126 https://archive.org/details/homerun_20201126 They might crash in full screen though (some kind of bug)

112233 3y ago
The reviews on the english version archive.org entry are a piece of art, memorial for the victims and something else altogether. Have not seen such reviews on anything else, not even close.
samketchup 3y ago
I just struck out 5 times in a row, finally made solid contact and the game crashed. Thank you, lol
- haunter 3y ago
  Try not to play fullscreen. Started crashing some months ago. Or download the sfw file and play with the standalone Ruffle.rs client
  - Bakingpotato 3y ago
    did you report that to the bug tracker?
    - haunter 3y ago
      Looks like someone already did!
  - adrian17 3y ago
    (Ruffle dev here) We took a look at `Home Run Derby` specifically and found some bugs and inefficiencies - the most recent builds should run faster and hopefully crash less :)

Bakingpotato 3y ago

huh, so the Ruffle technology is actually something to consider. Much better than the last 5+ years of flash 'alternatives' tried some games out, most look identical to FP somehow.

anticensor 3y ago

I misread as "Internet Explorer expands Flash support" for a moment.

NelsonMinar 3y ago

Compare with ooooooooo.ooo, recently discussed on Metafilter in great detail: https://www.metafilter.com/199981/Friday-Flash-Fun-Forever https://www.metafilter.com/199981/Friday-Flash-Fun-Forever

CSMastermind 3y ago

I was just watching a YouTube video about Home Star Runner yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wbh9-mNmviE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wbh9-mNmviE I never watched the series myself but I do remember hearing about it. In the video essay he talks about how flash videos like Home Star Runner were a unique medium. Not quite passive like a video but not quite interactive like a video game. The videos could be watched passively but also could incorporate interactive elements like minigames, easter eggs, and choose your own adventure stories. He points out that even when Netflix dipped into the choose your own adventure format they couldn't achieve the same flexibility as a flash animation because if for example they wanted to make a story change that would dye a character's hair blue they couldn't possibly film all the permutations scenes required to propagate that visual difference throughout the story. But in flash animation you can. You can easily let the audience choose a character's hair color and have that effect the animation for the rest of the story. The author of that YouTube video made me wish I could experience those cartoons and it makes me happy that places like the IA are making that possible.

Bakingpotato 3y ago
yeah, lots of Flash games were actually innovative. plenty of developers got their start on NG with flash before moving on to make console or steam games. flash had plenty of shovelware, but you can still make incredible stuff with it.
- klenwell 3y ago
  Good example here: https://archive.org/details/thequestfortherest_flash https://archive.org/details/thequestfortherest_flash It works! It had been effectively defunct for years: https://amanita-design.net/thequestfortherest/ https://amanita-design.net/thequestfortherest/
  - Bakingpotato 3y ago
    good pick.
TillE 3y ago

lucgommans 3y ago

They link to a collection called "Software Library: Flash". How do I add something there? I've uploaded gravityrunner years ago and recently (45 days ago, the site tells me) figured out how to activate the emulator for this swf file (not sure why not offer to emulate any .swf file but ok), but it's also not showing up¹ in things like Flash game collections. Is there any documentation on this? Edit: wait, I think I found it. Below the About text, there is a filter for "AND primary_collection:softwarelibrary_flash". Probably I need to add that tag to my item. Now I wonder how I'm supposed to know of the relevant collections to put things in? Is there a list of all software categories? ¹ https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash?query=gravityrunner https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash?query=grav... whereas it is on the site-wide search: https://archive.org/search?query=gravityrunner https://archive.org/search?query=gravityrunner

Bakingpotato 3y ago
not that I've seen. one thing you can try to do is add the Ruffle emulator flags to your metadata, and they'll probably pick it up and place it in that category whenever the next time they do a sweep. I guess you can also email them, hey are pretty prompt by email, usually.
ehPReth 3y ago
Try @textfiles on Twitter

Apocryphon 3y ago

Does this mean that previously archived sites that use Flash will now be viewable?

lucgommans 3y ago
That would be nice. I was recently trying to play https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/science/rock-paper-scissors.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/scie... via archive.org, but it doesn't work. Also the swf file itself does not load in an old virtual machine. I don't know where to view error output besides the JavaScript console; it simply does nothing. (Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2290936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2290936) I still occasionally think back to this engine when the topic of human randomness comes up (I do computer security for a living, so that's not infrequent)
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  Ruffle ships a browser extension that loads Ruffle into every tab you open, so Flash sites work as they were originally intended to. It's available for Chrome and Firefox. Safari works if you enable developer extensions and download our macOS app - we have to get into Mac App Store for it to work normally because apparently notarization isn't enough[0]. https://ruffle.rs/#downloads https://ruffle.rs/#downloads [0] It was enough for the old extensions API :/
  - lucgommans 3y ago
    Did that work on the NYT site for you? Because for me it doesn't seem to, but then I figure you're just replying in general and not about this rock-paper-scissors AI
    - kmeisthax 3y ago
      I did try on Ruffle, but it's a slightly older version, it's possible that either newer versions have a regression or you have a really old extension version.

justsomehnguy 3y ago

At some point Flash emulation would solve all the biggest troubles of the original Flash and.. became a new standard for a web-based inter/animation? Of course, having a VM with XP with Macrmedia director would be a problem for Apple M1/2/3 owners, but nothing a modern emulation couldn't solve...

Bakingpotato 3y ago
would it solve the problems? absolutely. would browser vendors pick it up for a standard? almost definitely not. though, nothing is stopping anyone from creating new flash games, videos, etc. the software is out there, and NG already does flash game jams.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  Well, the modern CSS + animations + SVG solves like 90% of things Flash could do, with HTML5 and canvas it solves the remaining 9%. but the biggest problem is the authoring tools and I if there were anything worthwile enough the web would had exploded already.
  - rhn_mk1 3y ago
    I'm not sure if it's included in your 90%, but an advantage of Flash is that it was not JS or HTML. Meaning that you could block it easily, when it offended your senses (animated ads, autoplaying videos), without affecting the functionality of most web sites. CSS + animations + JS + HTML5 cannot be blocked without destroying the web site as well.
    - Bakingpotato 3y ago
      yeah I remember that people demonized flash so much for that and turned a blind eye once html and javascript was given that power. jokes on them now, I guess not to mention flash content could run on a potato, while javascript is soon to see your processor as fried as a potato chip instead
    - 3y ago

BenFranklin100 3y ago

This is encouraging news. These sorts of efforts help save information from being buried in the trash heap of history. Is anyone aware of coordinated efforts beyond the internet archive to save data in old formats and media? I actually have information on 5.25 floppies I never copied over (my bad) that are almost certainly lost at this point. Also, I have docs in PFS Write format that will be PITA to recover at this point too. I’d have to dig out that old 486 that has been gathering dust in my basement the last 25 years to know for sure :) .

Bakingpotato 3y ago
I don't know of too many, but there are some out there like https://hiddenpalace.org/ https://hiddenpalace.org/ (though that is more related to video games).
xp84 3y ago
Look for platform-specific sites. For instance, 80s Mac stuff has at least a couple, like Macintosh Garden.

Alifatisk 3y ago

Part of me feel sad that the big players deprecated flash before any good alternatives popped up, HTML5 wasn't exactly an alternative yet. Flash was waaay more powerful, I think we lost a bit of good technology there. Hopefully we'll get it back soon.

Bakingpotato 3y ago
yeah. the closest to getting flash back is Ruffle, which works pretty well, and Newgrounds does flash game jams still, so it ain't all dead
em3rgent0rdr 3y ago
Particularly for vector-based animated movies, can achieve much higher quality-per-bandwidth than compressed raster graphics, and are future-proofed to automatically handle higher video resolutions.
- Bakingpotato 3y ago
  yeah, a lot of flash content that was SVG exclusive can go up past 4k and look stunning, and flash was the only one around then (and debatably, now) with an editor to let someone leverage that
- xp84 3y ago
  This part itself is probably a lost art forever. As are many things that required great efficiency. Apart from a few embedded specialties. I feel the same pain though, watching a HomestarRunner video or something by means of a 200MB video when I know the SWFs were like 100KB.
  - Alifatisk 3y ago
    "watching a HomestarRunner video or something by means of a 200MB video when I know the SWFs were like 100KB." WOW
justinclift 3y ago
I'm also interested in seeing what happens with Ruffle can eventually play all (or say 99%) of the Flash files out there. Will they continue on, and make a "next generation flash" or something? aka Flash Done Right :)

dayvid 3y ago

Xiao Xiao was a nostalgia kick: https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash?query=xiao+xiao https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash?query=xiao...

Bakingpotato 3y ago
amen.

a1o 3y ago

Does anyone how to do this? I could tie existing wasm runtimes to some binaries that supports it (mostly old abandon ware games there that aren't flash), but when I asked around in forums no one answered there - or I didn't understood how their communities worked.

jonplackett 3y ago

The thing I still miss about Flash is the authoring tool. It is one of the few bits of software that bridged a gap between artists and creators and coding in a way that totally democratised creating interactive websites. I see some similarities with Instagram filters and TikTok effects. The visual-layout-you-can-add-code-to approach, but Flash was so mainstream and capable in a way filters aren’t. I wish Adobe had done a better job with flash and just converted the Flash Player into html5. Surely that could have been done? Website creation is far too complicated now compared to then and I think the level of experimentation - especially by lone artists - has plummeted since flash died.

johannes1234321 3y ago
Yes, I still haven't found a good alternative to easily build simple interactive animations for the web. Flash was fun, even with my limited artistic skills.
LadyMartel 3y ago
I fondly remember when I first discovered how to attach a goto action to a button and I went nuts with it making choose your own adventure type animations. Drawing was also really easy to make thing look decent even with a mouse. I haven't found (or admittedly looked for) a similar vector drawing tool like that ever since.
- ftmch 3y ago
  Yes, the generated brush strokes were really good. I was at one point just making static comics in Flash, using just a mouse because the brush strokes looked like they were drawn by someone way more skilled than myself.
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Bakingpotato 3y ago
nah, HTML5 was and still isn't good enough for a straight conversion, as years of flash ""alternatives"" have shown us.

codethief 3y ago

So does that mean I get to play Winterbells and Yeti Sports again? :)

codedokode 3y ago

In case anyone is wondering how much CPU Flash emulator uses: "Isolated Web Co" - 12%, Firefox - 16%, gnome-shell - 25%.

nathants 3y ago

working on a game right now. the second to last attempt was in godot 4. it reminded me a lot of flash, especially in 2d mode. to anyone missing flash go checkout godot!

hoten 3y ago
PIXI.js also gives a similar framework.
- andai 3y ago
  Have you used Phaser? I was under the impression that Pixi is just the graphics part, while Phaser (which uses Pixi) handles everything else.
  - hoten 3y ago
    I have not, so I'm not very familiar. PIXI provides Stage / DisplayObject / Sprite APIs that would be familiar to Flash programmers.

j4ah4n 3y ago

They certainly were fun days back with Macromedia at the helm. Full suite of tools that worked extremely well together. I remember when Tim Burton put out various cartoons via Director (the same used for countless DVDs) that opened up more dramatic storytelling than the business “intros” offered at the time (I built these too mind you). I was even Flash AS3 certified at one point, something I was very proud of in my early career. Good times.

Bakingpotato 3y ago
and then adobe spit on all of it. what a waste, and its all on adobe.

cempaka 3y ago

Went looking for a good old article about fanimutation, this is quite the walk down bored-college-dorm-session memory lane: https://www.austinchronicle.com/screens/2002-01-25/84480/ https://www.austinchronicle.com/screens/2002-01-25/84480/

willhackett 3y ago

This is pure nostalgia

Propelloni 3y ago
Agreed. We hated Flash back in the day. It was a terrible proprietary format, impossible to search, unstable and prone to crashes. It was even worse than JavaScript today. And it required a plugin. Obviously it did a lot of things right and we miss Flash for it. But it was almost universally despised in the early 2000s.
- dmvdoug 3y ago
  I was wondering about this because my only memory of it is just how much people hated it. That and security problems.

winstonprivacy 3y ago

Relevant: https://archive.org/details/flash-is-dead https://archive.org/details/flash-is-dead

mikercampbell 3y ago

Pokémon Tower Defense??

diggernet 3y ago

Sadly, flOw still doesn't work. https://archive.org/details/flash_flow https://archive.org/details/flash_flow In fact, the motion of the little bit that it does feels much less smooth than I remember from last time I checked.

justinclift 3y ago
Just tried it here (using Firefox on Linux), and it seems to be running ok. At least, the creature is smoothly turning and travelling towards wherever the mouse is. There don't seem to be any stutters, slowness, or other hiccups.
- diggernet 3y ago
  Thanks for checking. Same setup here. Feels a little jittery to me. I dunno, maybe it's in my head. Of course, the important bit is the poor little guy never gets any food to eat. So, no game.
  - justinclift 3y ago
    Yeah. I used to play Flow on the PS3, and thought it was awesome. :)

nineplay 3y ago

The orisinal games were one of my favorite things on the internet. I'm so happy to see them back. https://archive.org/details/chicken-wings https://archive.org/details/chicken-wings

WillAdams 3y ago

I hope this means that they will fix the site for the wonderful book _Bembo's Zoo_: https://web.archive.org/web/20050204004955/http://www.bemboszoo.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050204004955/http://www.bembos...

endgame 3y ago

Wow, there are a few animutations in their big "unsorted" collection: https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash_unsorted https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash_unsorted . Rewatching them brings back so many memories from High School.

phendrenad2 3y ago

I have a theory that Google killed flash so that they could index the web more effectively. There were many old websites that were entirely made in flash (or java applets), and the content that Google needed to scrape was buried inside a binary flash file. Flash had security vulnerabilities? News flash: So do javascript engines.

Bakingpotato 3y ago
while that might be true, its probably more true that they want to own the internet (see: nonstandard changes within chrome, forcibly making chromium dominant, the AMP debacle) and adobe SWF files aint google
pests 3y ago
They started to index flash software in 2008 and I even remember seeing flash in search results sometimes https://searchengineland.com/google-now-crawling-and-indexing-flash-content-14299 https://searchengineland.com/google-now-crawling-and-indexin...

lhball 3y ago

I had en elementary school teacher that made a website dedicated to flags games appropriate for students. It was amazing, FULL of games from my childhood: https://web.archive.org/web/20050407011006/www.gamewing.com https://web.archive.org/web/20050407011006/www.gamewing.com If they can get that working I’d be ecstatic!

wiredbutburned 3y ago
sweet!

slowhadoken 3y ago

Last time I checked BlueMaxima makes two flash emulators Flashpoint Ultimate and Flashpoint Infinity.

dumpsterdiver 3y ago

Possibly an unpopular opinion: Flash appears to have been a very capable medium for transporting intent, but the intent of that awesomeness was overshadowed by the shoddiness of the underlying implementation. Flash, in its various implementations, has always amounted "building a house upon sand". You don't have to search far to see this. It was an ignorantly thrown together security nightmare (ignorant in the sense that they had no idea how bad it actually was until the RCE's came raining down).

tagyro 3y ago

I have many fond memories of Flash. It was far from perfect, but it really brought together programming and art, to a level that I don't see today. Around 2005(?) I remember a Flash conference in Turin, Italy where I saw many great interactive CDs and games from artists from all around the world. Tokyoflash, Yugo Nakamura and many more creators that were building experiences which I have a hard time finding these days. In the latter years, there was FWA (Favourite Website Award) full of great flash websites (still remember GotMilk). And then came Flex and AIR, that made building "rich internet applications" fun. I left web development when Flash died and coming back to it now, after almost 20 years, and honestly, I don't think we're any better. Adobe being Adobe, never got to fix the security and performance of the Flash Player (a dedicated surfer can still find malware disguised as Flash Player).

romusha 3y ago

No reason to still use shitty technology

DaSHacka 3y ago
I agree, we should ditch JavaScript.

epa 3y ago

Im excited for this! So much is archived on flash that had thought to be lost

cantik88 3y ago

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giovannibonetti 3y ago

Regarding a modern alternative to Flash, I just want to mention the Scrimba webdev learning platform [1], which leverages a custom built programming language [2] for making interactive courses and save the videos in an optimized vector format with a very small footprint. It was released in a Launch HN 3 years ago [3]. Personally, I have used the platform to teach the basics of frontend web dev to my wife, and it was a great experience. [1] https://scrimba.com/ https://scrimba.com/ [2] https://scrimba.com/learn/imba https://scrimba.com/learn/imba [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24579699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24579699