12 ms·

Ruffle: Flash Player Emulator

351 points by rapnie 3y ago

bexsella 3y ago
I check in on this project every year or so, and I'm happy to see that their support for AS3 is creeping towards completion. I, like many, wasted so many hours in flash games while in school that it was sad to see an element of gaming history fall by the wayside. At least Ruffle can pick up some of the pieces. It does remind me that that there is still no way to play Wolfenstein RPG on iOS. I have an old iPod that I bought in 2010 almost exclusively to play it, but that battery won't last forever. But for now, I think I'll go and play some Adrenaline Challenge.
- GranPC 3y ago
  Wow, last I checked they were just getting started on AS3. Crazy to see how quickly they're getting there.
- slowhadoken 3y ago
  Same. I’m still looking for a way to play Inishie Dungeon again.
- koito17 3y ago
  About 18 months ago I recall hearing Ruffle had virtually no AS3 support, and that was a show stopper for me. I wasn't expecting them to get much done on this front for years. So in that time I simply installed the last version of Flash without the time bomb. Thankfully I am wrong :)
  - neverdied 3y ago
    the more I look, the more Ruffle seems to speed along. how did they get so good (and this fast) ?!?
    - TheDong 3y ago
      Unironically, because of rust. Rust's type system encodes more information than most languages, and so you can offload more work to it. That becomes more and more valuable as the project grows. Rust also attracts good developers in general, moreso than the average language certainly.
      - bsder 3y ago
        > Rust's type system encodes more information than most languages, and so you can offload more work to it. I suspect at least one of the developers would argue with you as I have listened to his rants. :) Rust is a remarkably poor match to implementing Flash because Flash has lots of object orientation with child and parent pointers--which Rust really hates. > Rust also attracts good developers in general, moreso than the average language certainly. I suspect this is way more relevant.
        teaearlgraycold 3y ago
        Couldn’t you just have a global object table and make your pointers indexes into this, using Rc::Refcells throughout? Rust is still fast with runtime GC.
        adrian17 3y ago
        More specifically (assuming we’re talking about the same thing), the issue is with reproducing a standard C++ inheritance hierarchy (used for both the AS2/3 native objects and for the „DOM” tree nodes), while keeping its overhead characteristics, devirtualisation opportunities, having it interact with our GC and borrow checker and still have a convenient, safe Rust API on top. Our current solution works, but has deficiencies in most of these aspects.
        pcwalton 3y ago
        I suspect that it's two things: (1) the relatively good support for Wasm in Rust; (2) the Cargo ecosystem. In the case of Ruffle, the combination of the two seems particularly effective.
      - subtra3t 3y ago
    - Cloudef 3y ago
      probably because of the sponsors
      - tetris11 3y ago
        Newgrounds being one
  - adrian17 3y ago
    Just to clarify: we already had a ton of work towards AS3 done before that, there was just nothing to show for it until we added some final missing pieces. It’s not like we did everything from scratch in 18 months.
- neverdied 3y ago
  I wish some of the long standing PRs Ruffle has would actually get in
- TazeTSchnitzel 3y ago
  > It does remind me that that there is still no way to play Wolfenstein RPG on iOS. This may change very soon :) https://github.com/hikari-no-yume/touchHLE/pull/139 https://github.com/hikari-no-yume/touchHLE/pull/139
  - bexsella 3y ago
    I will be following this very closely.
Conscat 3y ago
The popularity of two similarly named Rust projects, Ruff and Ruffle, seems mildly unfortunate.
- neverdied 3y ago
  I think people may have a tough time noticing the similarities between the projects whole different worlds of not confusing
lucasyvas 3y ago
I'm curious. Is authorship of new titles even a possibility once this ships, or is all tooling so beyond ressurection at this point that it would mostly serve as away to revive the back catalog? Obviously the back catalog is insanely massive, but from what I hear a lot of developers loved making Flash games - it would be interesting if anyone were dedicated enough to try to revive the scene. It's true that it's not really needed anymore and there are some promising web standards evolving every day. But that never stopped the crazy ones from making it work anyway. People are still finding ways to make new games for old Nintendo hardware.
- PBnFlash 3y ago
  New grounds has a "flashforward" event every year or so.
  - lucasyvas 3y ago
    Very cool. It would bring a smile to see this community grow large enough to make some noise. One of the best parts of a "dead" platform is that it doesn't change!
- echelon 3y ago
  Flash shouldn't have died. It was an incredibly accessible authorship tool that produced cross-platform single-file animations that were low-bandwidth and scaled. We still haven't made up for its loss. Javascript + canvas + web stack is a mess. If the Ruffle runtime could quickly start up, I'd start authoring new Flash.
  - neverdied 3y ago
    the only thing that really died was adobe's support (if you can call it that) and the web plugin I was kind of shocked how big the community still is
  - o11c 3y ago
    There was the teensy problem of being an unending bag of security vulnerabilities. Java Applets were its only competitor, and Java had the disadvantage of being fundamentally designed without security in mind.
neverdied 3y ago
The Ruffle dev team are a bunch of wizards. There have been other projects out there trying to do what they are and they took years and years to get there. I'm not sure how they got as far as they have in a fraction of the other's time, but they're doing something right. the adoption of it is very noticable. eat shit, Jobs.
dividendpayee 3y ago
This is neat. I hadn't seen it before. I'm still convinced that the internet -- and young, first-time programmers -- lost a really valuable tool with Flash. It's a shame they could never get the security paradigm to work. Flash Applets had a lot of capability and a rare low barrier to entry.
dikei 3y ago
Back when being a student, I remembered following GNU Gnash effort to support for AS2 and AS3, they took years, but in the end, still could only make it work partially. Flash was still dominant in the browsers at the time, yet nobody managed to port to Gnash before it died. I wonder how Ruffle get it working so fast.
- neverdied 3y ago
  they were probably less anal than GNU over licences
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    Why would the license matter to implementation speed?
    - neverdied 3y ago
      it tends to be hard to reverse engineer something with an explicit agreement that if you use it, you will not reverse it or at least, that was the fear at the time so, imagine making a program like gnash, without installing flash as it turned out, adobe never could actually enforce such a thing, but that didn't stop gnash from absolutely turning into a ghost town memory is a bit hazy, but thats the gist I got back then they were so careful, they buried the project, well done
      - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
        Oh, you mean they were careful about licensing on the in side, not the output side. I wouldn't call it "anal" to want to avoid lawsuits. Edit: You can't edit in > as it turned out, adobe never could actually enforce such a thing, and not explain it - did the courts change their whole view of reverse engineering or something?
    - haolez 3y ago
      I don't have knowledge specific to this case, but the license limits who you can accept code from.
Nevin1901 3y ago
Is there a website where I can play old flash games using ruffle?
- neverdied 3y ago
  Newgrounds, armorgames and bubblebox all use Ruffle for their flash games
- ackfoobar 3y ago
  You can install their browser plugin. I think all Orisinal games run fine with it.
  - faitswulff 3y ago
    Where do you find the Orisinal games? Looks like the original Ferry Halim website has taken them down.
    - nosamu 3y ago
      They're still up! http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/ http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/ You'll need to install the Ruffle extension in your browser to view them.
      - faitswulff 3y ago
        I didn't realize it was still on the page, I just saw the deprecation warning. Thank you!
- dhbradshaw 3y ago
  https://www.coolmathgames.com/coolmath-games-and-flash https://www.coolmathgames.com/coolmath-games-and-flash
- paradox460 3y ago
  Albinoblacksheep has it, but it's disabled by default for things that can be served as rendered video There's a switch in the footer
bitwize 3y ago
A.k.a. the project which is keeping Homestar Runner content alive in its original form.
- neverdied 3y ago
  quite a lot more than that, but aw yes, homestar runner
  - bitwize 3y ago
    Indeed, but honestly it would have been worth all the effort to keep h*r going in its original form alone.
liquidpele 3y ago
I hate Adobe with the passion of 100 suns for killing flash like they did… yea it had problems, most software does, but it was like 20 years ahead of its time ffs, and the web has been ridiculously bland since they killed it. My conspiracy theory is that apple and google paid them to kill it to force sites to support mobile.
- netcraft 3y ago
  Adobe capitulated, but apple killed it when it didnt support it on ios.
  - neverdied 3y ago
    apple killed it after Jobs had a hissy fit
  - liquidpele 3y ago
    Android did support it for a time though, it was a pretty good selling point in fact... but then google dropped it too :(
    - kergonath 3y ago
      Google never dropped it. Adobe did, when they realised that they could make money from HTML5 instead: https://web.archive.org/web/20170114145431/https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2011/11/flash-focus.html https://web.archive.org/web/20170114145431/https://blogs.ado... .
  - keepamovin 3y ago
    I'm working on bringing Flash to iOS via browser proxy^0. Basically, what we do is run the browser on the server and stream the viewport to your regular mobile browser (ie, Safari). Then we use Ruffle injected into the remote page. Basically it's a "monkey patch" to give you extensions-like capabilities but on mobile devices! 0: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox/issues/424 https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox/issues/424
dirtyhippiefree 3y ago
Video LAN Client (VLC) makes most codecs and emulators extra work, as even Flash plays using VLC.
- neverdied 3y ago
  I have never seen VLC run an SWF file and if somehow it can, definitely won't be much more than embedded videos.
  - Dwedit 3y ago
    Media Player Classic supported SWF files, basically by using the ActiveX Flash Player.
netcraft 3y ago
I wrote AS3 and mxml for adobe flex for several years. AS3 was in many ways ecmascript 4, and was IMO pretty far ahead of its time. Lots of things we get excited for today feels like stuff we took for granted on the web in the flash player ecosystem years ago. Don't get me wrong, there were times where it was a nightmare, but back when cross browser javascript was a struggle if it was even possible, we were able to ship a lot of great stuff.
- keyle 3y ago
  I too did that for many years. I'd say that AS3 wasn't ahead of its time, I'd say that we were sent back in time when we had to abandon Flash thanks to Steve Jobs and the bend-over Adobe CEO at the time. AS3 was super cool, easy to learn and safe to scale amongst many developers. Flash had gotten pretty darn fast near the end... And it was all sent down the toilet.
  - kergonath 3y ago
    > we had to abandon Flash thanks to Steve Jobs and the bend-over Adobe CEO at the time For the record, that is exactly how it did not happen.
    - keyle 3y ago
      I'm not sure what your references are, so let's discuss. At the time I was a full time flash developer, doing flex and flash on AIR. One day, Steve Jobs made an announcement that Flash was crapware and had to die for standards (sic!) I shook my head in disbelief. The same week, the CEO of Adobe (some shmuck) went to CNN to address what Steve Jobs had said earlier this week. I fully expected a rebuttal, but instead, NOPE: he totally and literally threw his product under the bus, on the world stage. Flash was dead. Its replacement was said to be coming, and yet nothing good came out. Javascript at the time was pitiful. Typescript didn't exist yet, and MVVM in HTML wasn't a thing. We were back to web 1.0.
      - jadbox 3y ago
dugite-code 3y ago
Oh man you can load local files. Just mucked around with the first game I ever made in high school, man I miss doing that stuff.
- accrual 3y ago
  That's awesome you still have the files! I made a point to go and collect some of my favorite old flash games and keep them in a folder along with Ruffle - makes it super easy to spin them up again, especially as the hosts slowly go away. Some examples: Age of War, Bloons, Bowman, Charlie the Unicorn, Frog Blender, Impossible Quiz, Interactive Buddy, Line Rider, Madness Interactive, N+, Pandemic 2, Dinorun, Ratmaze, Portal, Red., Snowcraft, Fancy Pants Adventure
  - andrepd 3y ago
    There is a preservation project called Flashpoint, they have over 170,000 titles at the moment!
  - dugite-code 3y ago
    Yeah I've always been a bit of a data hoarder. One file is broken due to data rott which is a shame but I have some of the old source files so I might be able to recover most of it. But everything else is on a ZFS pool now so should stick around. I need to dig into some old zip files and see if I still have some of the old downloaded copies of some of games I used to play around
- andrepd 3y ago
  Same. Wave of nostalgia hitting so hard that I can picture the computer room at my middle school.
ehPReth 3y ago
great project! I've used it to bring back some nostalgia for myself :)
danShumway 3y ago
There's no technical or organizational reason why it shouldn't have ended up this way, and I have absolutely no grounds to be mad about it, and Ruffle is a great project. Flash preservation is really valuable, and I love that Ruffle is still being actively developed and improved, and I wish the project all the best. But I am still irrationally bitter that Shumway ended up getting abandoned by Mozilla and that Ruffle took its place, for obvious reasons.
- mauricioc 3y ago
  Shumway happened before Flash EOL, so it's likely that Adobe forced development to stop. Although Ruffle existed before January 2021, it flew under the radar back then. Even if Adobe had no hand in it, it's much easier (and less risky) to fund an implementation after the official one reaches EOL.
amjoshuamichael 3y ago
Discussions about Flash emulation always delve to Flash games, but beyond that, I think one of the big benefits is several informational websites that still rely on flash that haven't been able to catch up. The New York Historical Society exhibit Slavery in New York has a page called [The Merchant's House](https://www.slaveryinnewyork.org/gallery_3_1.htm https://www.slaveryinnewyork.org/gallery_3_1.htm) where they go through items and explain how "Everything was touched by slavery." The online version of the exhibit has a lot of information bits that rely on flash, but that one was personally my favorite. One of the benefits of a project like Ruffle is that we can maintain these works–now that the exhibit is gone, it's the only way to view this written work, and reap the benefits of the extensive historical research done. The only thing I've seen it fail with is the [video galleries]https://www.slaveryinnewyork.org/gallery_2_responses.htm https://www.slaveryinnewyork.org/gallery_2_responses.htm) on the same exhibit site. They're supposed to be video clips that people took in dedicated booths after going through the exhibit. I've read about the exhibit extensively and it seems like these videos were a really good insight into the way the New York public viewed slavery at the time: "They have the awkwardness of amateur home videos: background noise, long silences, people looking away from the camera." (taken from The Anger and Shock of a City's Slave Past, New York Times) It's supposed to be a subset of some 400 videos, but I can't get Ruffle to work on these pages specifically. I've had a couple flashes of audio come out of the tab while trying to view one, so I know that something is going on, but I've never been able to watch any of the videos. Does anyone with more knowledge than me know what's going on here? I'd hate to see all that disappear.
- nosamu 3y ago
  I've passed this on to the Ruffle team, thanks! They are working on improving support for external videos, which was added only a few months ago.
- akx 3y ago
  For what it's worth, the videos are still there (e.g. https://www.slaveryinnewyork.org/flash/Gallery7Responses2.flv https://www.slaveryinnewyork.org/flash/Gallery7Responses2.fl...; you can see these URLs getting requested in your browser's Network inspector) and can be readily played offline with e.g. VLC, ffplay, etc., and could be converted to a more modernly playable format just as well.
ab9k 3y ago
doit
pjmlp 3y ago
The only thing that makes me happy about Web Assembly is that we got our plugins back. Sure the Web stagnated a decade catching up with 2011, but thanks to Unity, Flutter and Blazor, among others, we're getting there.
wg0 3y ago
Adobe Flash is dead? I mean Adobe isn't selling it as product? If so, why they didn't open source the Flash player part? I wish there were a law to ensure that if you're not selling a software anymore, you have to leave it in public domain.
- grishka 3y ago
  I asked the same question in one of the previous threads. Was told that most likely Flash player includes too much licensed third-party code that it would be too much work, if at all possible, to strip it out or relicense it for open-sourcing. At least all the relevant specifications are freely available from Adobe themselves. > I wish there were a law to ensure that if you're not selling a software anymore, you have to leave it in public domain. Shortening the copyright to something sensible like 5 years would've been nice too. Or better yet, require an exponentially increasing tax every year for copyright to be maintained.
  - returnInfinity 3y ago
    Correct, its the third parties.
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    > Shortening the copyright to something sensible like 5 years would've been nice too. Even juste going down to 20 years like it used to be before IP portfolio owners lobbied to extend it would be a massive improvement already.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  Usually companies don't so this because of legal risks - ie. Some of the libraries they used perhaps they didn't license in a way that allowed opensourcing. A law change could fix this. Ie. A new antique software preservation law could enable any software be opensourced, yet prevent any lawsuits relating to any actions taken under that law. The law could give extra incentives too, for example requiring that any software ever sold commercially either be archived in perpetuity, or opensourced. Legally archiving something forever is expensive, so many will opt to opensource it.
trenchgun 3y ago
There is also OpenFL built on HaXe: https://www.openfl.org/ https://www.openfl.org/ Which is not an emulator, but more of a spiritual successor, following the same API, and with tools to convert Actionscript projects
LoveMortuus 3y ago
Very exciting, I recently installed Ruffle, as I do multiple times per year, to check if it already supports one of my favourite games, but sadly it's still not there. (The game in referring to is Crystal Saga) It's an MMORPG, which is probably why it still doesn't work. But I'm sure that in time, we'll get there! Exciting times!!
Dwedit 3y ago
One issue I'm having is poor audio-video sync, like off by over 500ms.
shultays 3y ago
No rust in title? I am shocked
hackideiomat 3y ago
> we can confidently avoid all the security pitfalls that Flash had a reputation for There wasn't only memory issues. Flash was also vulnerable to clickjacking for instance. Also, if you do not break the browsers resitrictions, flash is not feature complete (e.g., make cross origin requests and read responses). But if you do support it, you also have the security implications.
- nine_k 3y ago
  At least this can be done responsibly. Ruffle might ask the user, and let the user deny such requests, allow them once, or allow for a particular combination of domains, and blindly everywhere like Flash would do.
justinclift 3y ago
Off topic, but is anyone working for Adobe here that has access to the Adobe Fastly account? If so, you should probably look into the Fastly config settings: Fastly error: unknown domain: blogs.adobe.com. Please check that this domain has been added to a service. That's a current live error when trying to go to old blogs.adobe.com articles. The above one is from this url: https://blogs.adobe.com/asset/2012/06/inside-flash-player-protected-mode-for-firefox.html https://blogs.adobe.com/asset/2012/06/inside-flash-player-pr...
diggan 3y ago
For a live demo, it seems Internet Archive deployed Ruffle for their web archives, and seems to be working well: https://web.archive.org/web/20030208023358/http://www.miniclip.com/bubbletrouble.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20030208023358/http://www.minicl...
shp0ngle 3y ago
Btw there is this (commercial) tool that turns Flash to webassembly. What they actually do is they run whole Linux (!!) in VM in webassembly, then they run the officially licensed Adobe Flash player there (and you need a separate license for that from... Harman? as those now own Flash IP). https://labs.leaningtech.com/cheerpx/for-flash https://labs.leaningtech.com/cheerpx/for-flash (I'm not affiliated with them in any way. Just found it interesting one day.)
- nanaian 3y ago
  Developer here. CheerpX for Flash runs the Pepper API version of Flash, and you're correct about the license. However, we don't do full Linux emulation just to run Flash - we emulate PPAPI and run the Flash player in an x86 JIT (CheerpX). Yuri talks about CXFF's architecture here: https://youtu.be/7JUs4c99-mo?t=1045 https://youtu.be/7JUs4c99-mo?t=1045 ...but if you wanted full Linux system emulation, we got it! https://webvm.io https://webvm.io
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
What was the reason for submitting this OP? Just curious or something new here?
appleaday1 3y ago
BASED BASED BASED

351 points by rapnie 3y ago

I check in on this project every year or so, and I'm happy to see that their support for AS3 is creeping towards completion. I, like many, wasted so many hours in flash games while in school that it was sad to see an element of gaming history fall by the wayside. At least Ruffle can pick up some of the pieces. It does remind me that that there is still no way to play Wolfenstein RPG on iOS. I have an old iPod that I bought in 2010 almost exclusively to play it, but that battery won't last forever. But for now, I think I'll go and play some Adrenaline Challenge.

GranPC 3y ago
Wow, last I checked they were just getting started on AS3. Crazy to see how quickly they're getting there.
slowhadoken 3y ago
Same. I’m still looking for a way to play Inishie Dungeon again.
koito17 3y ago
About 18 months ago I recall hearing Ruffle had virtually no AS3 support, and that was a show stopper for me. I wasn't expecting them to get much done on this front for years. So in that time I simply installed the last version of Flash without the time bomb. Thankfully I am wrong :)
- neverdied 3y ago
  the more I look, the more Ruffle seems to speed along. how did they get so good (and this fast) ?!?
  - TheDong 3y ago
    Unironically, because of rust. Rust's type system encodes more information than most languages, and so you can offload more work to it. That becomes more and more valuable as the project grows. Rust also attracts good developers in general, moreso than the average language certainly.
    - bsder 3y ago
      > Rust's type system encodes more information than most languages, and so you can offload more work to it. I suspect at least one of the developers would argue with you as I have listened to his rants. :) Rust is a remarkably poor match to implementing Flash because Flash has lots of object orientation with child and parent pointers--which Rust really hates. > Rust also attracts good developers in general, moreso than the average language certainly. I suspect this is way more relevant.
      - teaearlgraycold 3y ago
        Couldn’t you just have a global object table and make your pointers indexes into this, using Rc::Refcells throughout? Rust is still fast with runtime GC.
      - adrian17 3y ago
        More specifically (assuming we’re talking about the same thing), the issue is with reproducing a standard C++ inheritance hierarchy (used for both the AS2/3 native objects and for the „DOM” tree nodes), while keeping its overhead characteristics, devirtualisation opportunities, having it interact with our GC and borrow checker and still have a convenient, safe Rust API on top. Our current solution works, but has deficiencies in most of these aspects.
      - pcwalton 3y ago
        I suspect that it's two things: (1) the relatively good support for Wasm in Rust; (2) the Cargo ecosystem. In the case of Ruffle, the combination of the two seems particularly effective.
    - subtra3t 3y ago
  - Cloudef 3y ago
    probably because of the sponsors
    - tetris11 3y ago
      Newgrounds being one
- adrian17 3y ago
  Just to clarify: we already had a ton of work towards AS3 done before that, there was just nothing to show for it until we added some final missing pieces. It’s not like we did everything from scratch in 18 months.
neverdied 3y ago
I wish some of the long standing PRs Ruffle has would actually get in
TazeTSchnitzel 3y ago
> It does remind me that that there is still no way to play Wolfenstein RPG on iOS. This may change very soon :) https://github.com/hikari-no-yume/touchHLE/pull/139 https://github.com/hikari-no-yume/touchHLE/pull/139
- bexsella 3y ago
  I will be following this very closely.

Conscat 3y ago

The popularity of two similarly named Rust projects, Ruff and Ruffle, seems mildly unfortunate.

neverdied 3y ago
I think people may have a tough time noticing the similarities between the projects whole different worlds of not confusing

lucasyvas 3y ago

I'm curious. Is authorship of new titles even a possibility once this ships, or is all tooling so beyond ressurection at this point that it would mostly serve as away to revive the back catalog? Obviously the back catalog is insanely massive, but from what I hear a lot of developers loved making Flash games - it would be interesting if anyone were dedicated enough to try to revive the scene. It's true that it's not really needed anymore and there are some promising web standards evolving every day. But that never stopped the crazy ones from making it work anyway. People are still finding ways to make new games for old Nintendo hardware.

PBnFlash 3y ago
New grounds has a "flashforward" event every year or so.
- lucasyvas 3y ago
  Very cool. It would bring a smile to see this community grow large enough to make some noise. One of the best parts of a "dead" platform is that it doesn't change!
echelon 3y ago
Flash shouldn't have died. It was an incredibly accessible authorship tool that produced cross-platform single-file animations that were low-bandwidth and scaled. We still haven't made up for its loss. Javascript + canvas + web stack is a mess. If the Ruffle runtime could quickly start up, I'd start authoring new Flash.
- neverdied 3y ago
  the only thing that really died was adobe's support (if you can call it that) and the web plugin I was kind of shocked how big the community still is
- o11c 3y ago
  There was the teensy problem of being an unending bag of security vulnerabilities. Java Applets were its only competitor, and Java had the disadvantage of being fundamentally designed without security in mind.

neverdied 3y ago

The Ruffle dev team are a bunch of wizards. There have been other projects out there trying to do what they are and they took years and years to get there. I'm not sure how they got as far as they have in a fraction of the other's time, but they're doing something right. the adoption of it is very noticable. eat shit, Jobs.

dividendpayee 3y ago

This is neat. I hadn't seen it before. I'm still convinced that the internet -- and young, first-time programmers -- lost a really valuable tool with Flash. It's a shame they could never get the security paradigm to work. Flash Applets had a lot of capability and a rare low barrier to entry.

dikei 3y ago

Back when being a student, I remembered following GNU Gnash effort to support for AS2 and AS3, they took years, but in the end, still could only make it work partially. Flash was still dominant in the browsers at the time, yet nobody managed to port to Gnash before it died. I wonder how Ruffle get it working so fast.

neverdied 3y ago
they were probably less anal than GNU over licences
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  Why would the license matter to implementation speed?
  - neverdied 3y ago
    it tends to be hard to reverse engineer something with an explicit agreement that if you use it, you will not reverse it or at least, that was the fear at the time so, imagine making a program like gnash, without installing flash as it turned out, adobe never could actually enforce such a thing, but that didn't stop gnash from absolutely turning into a ghost town memory is a bit hazy, but thats the gist I got back then they were so careful, they buried the project, well done
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      Oh, you mean they were careful about licensing on the in side, not the output side. I wouldn't call it "anal" to want to avoid lawsuits. Edit: You can't edit in > as it turned out, adobe never could actually enforce such a thing, and not explain it - did the courts change their whole view of reverse engineering or something?
  - haolez 3y ago
    I don't have knowledge specific to this case, but the license limits who you can accept code from.

Nevin1901 3y ago

Is there a website where I can play old flash games using ruffle?

neverdied 3y ago
Newgrounds, armorgames and bubblebox all use Ruffle for their flash games
ackfoobar 3y ago
You can install their browser plugin. I think all Orisinal games run fine with it.
- faitswulff 3y ago
  Where do you find the Orisinal games? Looks like the original Ferry Halim website has taken them down.
  - nosamu 3y ago
    They're still up! http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/ http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/ You'll need to install the Ruffle extension in your browser to view them.
    - faitswulff 3y ago
      I didn't realize it was still on the page, I just saw the deprecation warning. Thank you!
dhbradshaw 3y ago
https://www.coolmathgames.com/coolmath-games-and-flash https://www.coolmathgames.com/coolmath-games-and-flash
paradox460 3y ago
Albinoblacksheep has it, but it's disabled by default for things that can be served as rendered video There's a switch in the footer

bitwize 3y ago

A.k.a. the project which is keeping Homestar Runner content alive in its original form.

neverdied 3y ago
quite a lot more than that, but aw yes, homestar runner
- bitwize 3y ago
  Indeed, but honestly it would have been worth all the effort to keep h*r going in its original form alone.

liquidpele 3y ago

I hate Adobe with the passion of 100 suns for killing flash like they did… yea it had problems, most software does, but it was like 20 years ahead of its time ffs, and the web has been ridiculously bland since they killed it. My conspiracy theory is that apple and google paid them to kill it to force sites to support mobile.

netcraft 3y ago
Adobe capitulated, but apple killed it when it didnt support it on ios.
- neverdied 3y ago
  apple killed it after Jobs had a hissy fit
- liquidpele 3y ago
  Android did support it for a time though, it was a pretty good selling point in fact... but then google dropped it too :(
  - kergonath 3y ago
    Google never dropped it. Adobe did, when they realised that they could make money from HTML5 instead: https://web.archive.org/web/20170114145431/https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2011/11/flash-focus.html https://web.archive.org/web/20170114145431/https://blogs.ado... .
- keepamovin 3y ago
  I'm working on bringing Flash to iOS via browser proxy^0. Basically, what we do is run the browser on the server and stream the viewport to your regular mobile browser (ie, Safari). Then we use Ruffle injected into the remote page. Basically it's a "monkey patch" to give you extensions-like capabilities but on mobile devices! 0: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox/issues/424 https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox/issues/424

dirtyhippiefree 3y ago

Video LAN Client (VLC) makes most codecs and emulators extra work, as even Flash plays using VLC.

neverdied 3y ago
I have never seen VLC run an SWF file and if somehow it can, definitely won't be much more than embedded videos.
- Dwedit 3y ago
  Media Player Classic supported SWF files, basically by using the ActiveX Flash Player.

netcraft 3y ago

I wrote AS3 and mxml for adobe flex for several years. AS3 was in many ways ecmascript 4, and was IMO pretty far ahead of its time. Lots of things we get excited for today feels like stuff we took for granted on the web in the flash player ecosystem years ago. Don't get me wrong, there were times where it was a nightmare, but back when cross browser javascript was a struggle if it was even possible, we were able to ship a lot of great stuff.

keyle 3y ago
I too did that for many years. I'd say that AS3 wasn't ahead of its time, I'd say that we were sent back in time when we had to abandon Flash thanks to Steve Jobs and the bend-over Adobe CEO at the time. AS3 was super cool, easy to learn and safe to scale amongst many developers. Flash had gotten pretty darn fast near the end... And it was all sent down the toilet.
- kergonath 3y ago
  > we had to abandon Flash thanks to Steve Jobs and the bend-over Adobe CEO at the time For the record, that is exactly how it did not happen.
  - keyle 3y ago
    I'm not sure what your references are, so let's discuss. At the time I was a full time flash developer, doing flex and flash on AIR. One day, Steve Jobs made an announcement that Flash was crapware and had to die for standards (sic!) I shook my head in disbelief. The same week, the CEO of Adobe (some shmuck) went to CNN to address what Steve Jobs had said earlier this week. I fully expected a rebuttal, but instead, NOPE: he totally and literally threw his product under the bus, on the world stage. Flash was dead. Its replacement was said to be coming, and yet nothing good came out. Javascript at the time was pitiful. Typescript didn't exist yet, and MVVM in HTML wasn't a thing. We were back to web 1.0.
    - jadbox 3y ago

dugite-code 3y ago

Oh man you can load local files. Just mucked around with the first game I ever made in high school, man I miss doing that stuff.

accrual 3y ago
That's awesome you still have the files! I made a point to go and collect some of my favorite old flash games and keep them in a folder along with Ruffle - makes it super easy to spin them up again, especially as the hosts slowly go away. Some examples: Age of War, Bloons, Bowman, Charlie the Unicorn, Frog Blender, Impossible Quiz, Interactive Buddy, Line Rider, Madness Interactive, N+, Pandemic 2, Dinorun, Ratmaze, Portal, Red., Snowcraft, Fancy Pants Adventure
- andrepd 3y ago
  There is a preservation project called Flashpoint, they have over 170,000 titles at the moment!
- dugite-code 3y ago
  Yeah I've always been a bit of a data hoarder. One file is broken due to data rott which is a shame but I have some of the old source files so I might be able to recover most of it. But everything else is on a ZFS pool now so should stick around. I need to dig into some old zip files and see if I still have some of the old downloaded copies of some of games I used to play around
andrepd 3y ago
Same. Wave of nostalgia hitting so hard that I can picture the computer room at my middle school.

ehPReth 3y ago

great project! I've used it to bring back some nostalgia for myself :)

danShumway 3y ago

There's no technical or organizational reason why it shouldn't have ended up this way, and I have absolutely no grounds to be mad about it, and Ruffle is a great project. Flash preservation is really valuable, and I love that Ruffle is still being actively developed and improved, and I wish the project all the best. But I am still irrationally bitter that Shumway ended up getting abandoned by Mozilla and that Ruffle took its place, for obvious reasons.

mauricioc 3y ago
Shumway happened before Flash EOL, so it's likely that Adobe forced development to stop. Although Ruffle existed before January 2021, it flew under the radar back then. Even if Adobe had no hand in it, it's much easier (and less risky) to fund an implementation after the official one reaches EOL.

amjoshuamichael 3y ago

Discussions about Flash emulation always delve to Flash games, but beyond that, I think one of the big benefits is several informational websites that still rely on flash that haven't been able to catch up. The New York Historical Society exhibit Slavery in New York has a page called [The Merchant's House](https://www.slaveryinnewyork.org/gallery_3_1.htm https://www.slaveryinnewyork.org/gallery_3_1.htm) where they go through items and explain how "Everything was touched by slavery." The online version of the exhibit has a lot of information bits that rely on flash, but that one was personally my favorite. One of the benefits of a project like Ruffle is that we can maintain these works–now that the exhibit is gone, it's the only way to view this written work, and reap the benefits of the extensive historical research done. The only thing I've seen it fail with is the [video galleries]https://www.slaveryinnewyork.org/gallery_2_responses.htm https://www.slaveryinnewyork.org/gallery_2_responses.htm) on the same exhibit site. They're supposed to be video clips that people took in dedicated booths after going through the exhibit. I've read about the exhibit extensively and it seems like these videos were a really good insight into the way the New York public viewed slavery at the time: "They have the awkwardness of amateur home videos: background noise, long silences, people looking away from the camera." (taken from The Anger and Shock of a City's Slave Past, New York Times) It's supposed to be a subset of some 400 videos, but I can't get Ruffle to work on these pages specifically. I've had a couple flashes of audio come out of the tab while trying to view one, so I know that something is going on, but I've never been able to watch any of the videos. Does anyone with more knowledge than me know what's going on here? I'd hate to see all that disappear.

nosamu 3y ago
I've passed this on to the Ruffle team, thanks! They are working on improving support for external videos, which was added only a few months ago.
akx 3y ago
For what it's worth, the videos are still there (e.g. https://www.slaveryinnewyork.org/flash/Gallery7Responses2.flv https://www.slaveryinnewyork.org/flash/Gallery7Responses2.fl...; you can see these URLs getting requested in your browser's Network inspector) and can be readily played offline with e.g. VLC, ffplay, etc., and could be converted to a more modernly playable format just as well.

ab9k 3y ago

doit

pjmlp 3y ago

The only thing that makes me happy about Web Assembly is that we got our plugins back. Sure the Web stagnated a decade catching up with 2011, but thanks to Unity, Flutter and Blazor, among others, we're getting there.

wg0 3y ago

Adobe Flash is dead? I mean Adobe isn't selling it as product? If so, why they didn't open source the Flash player part? I wish there were a law to ensure that if you're not selling a software anymore, you have to leave it in public domain.

grishka 3y ago
I asked the same question in one of the previous threads. Was told that most likely Flash player includes too much licensed third-party code that it would be too much work, if at all possible, to strip it out or relicense it for open-sourcing. At least all the relevant specifications are freely available from Adobe themselves. > I wish there were a law to ensure that if you're not selling a software anymore, you have to leave it in public domain. Shortening the copyright to something sensible like 5 years would've been nice too. Or better yet, require an exponentially increasing tax every year for copyright to be maintained.
- returnInfinity 3y ago
  Correct, its the third parties.
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  > Shortening the copyright to something sensible like 5 years would've been nice too. Even juste going down to 20 years like it used to be before IP portfolio owners lobbied to extend it would be a massive improvement already.
londons_explore 3y ago
Usually companies don't so this because of legal risks - ie. Some of the libraries they used perhaps they didn't license in a way that allowed opensourcing. A law change could fix this. Ie. A new antique software preservation law could enable any software be opensourced, yet prevent any lawsuits relating to any actions taken under that law. The law could give extra incentives too, for example requiring that any software ever sold commercially either be archived in perpetuity, or opensourced. Legally archiving something forever is expensive, so many will opt to opensource it.

trenchgun 3y ago

There is also OpenFL built on HaXe: https://www.openfl.org/ https://www.openfl.org/ Which is not an emulator, but more of a spiritual successor, following the same API, and with tools to convert Actionscript projects

LoveMortuus 3y ago

Very exciting, I recently installed Ruffle, as I do multiple times per year, to check if it already supports one of my favourite games, but sadly it's still not there. (The game in referring to is Crystal Saga) It's an MMORPG, which is probably why it still doesn't work. But I'm sure that in time, we'll get there! Exciting times!!

Dwedit 3y ago

One issue I'm having is poor audio-video sync, like off by over 500ms.

shultays 3y ago

No rust in title? I am shocked

hackideiomat 3y ago

> we can confidently avoid all the security pitfalls that Flash had a reputation for There wasn't only memory issues. Flash was also vulnerable to clickjacking for instance. Also, if you do not break the browsers resitrictions, flash is not feature complete (e.g., make cross origin requests and read responses). But if you do support it, you also have the security implications.

nine_k 3y ago
At least this can be done responsibly. Ruffle might ask the user, and let the user deny such requests, allow them once, or allow for a particular combination of domains, and blindly everywhere like Flash would do.

justinclift 3y ago

Off topic, but is anyone working for Adobe here that has access to the Adobe Fastly account? If so, you should probably look into the Fastly config settings: Fastly error: unknown domain: blogs.adobe.com. Please check that this domain has been added to a service. That's a current live error when trying to go to old blogs.adobe.com articles. The above one is from this url: https://blogs.adobe.com/asset/2012/06/inside-flash-player-protected-mode-for-firefox.html https://blogs.adobe.com/asset/2012/06/inside-flash-player-pr...

diggan 3y ago

For a live demo, it seems Internet Archive deployed Ruffle for their web archives, and seems to be working well: https://web.archive.org/web/20030208023358/http://www.miniclip.com/bubbletrouble.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20030208023358/http://www.minicl...

shp0ngle 3y ago

Btw there is this (commercial) tool that turns Flash to webassembly. What they actually do is they run whole Linux (!!) in VM in webassembly, then they run the officially licensed Adobe Flash player there (and you need a separate license for that from... Harman? as those now own Flash IP). https://labs.leaningtech.com/cheerpx/for-flash https://labs.leaningtech.com/cheerpx/for-flash (I'm not affiliated with them in any way. Just found it interesting one day.)

nanaian 3y ago
Developer here. CheerpX for Flash runs the Pepper API version of Flash, and you're correct about the license. However, we don't do full Linux emulation just to run Flash - we emulate PPAPI and run the Flash player in an x86 JIT (CheerpX). Yuri talks about CXFF's architecture here: https://youtu.be/7JUs4c99-mo?t=1045 https://youtu.be/7JUs4c99-mo?t=1045 ...but if you wanted full Linux system emulation, we got it! https://webvm.io https://webvm.io

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

What was the reason for submitting this OP? Just curious or something new here?

appleaday1 3y ago

BASED BASED BASED