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For the longest time, Flash only ran correctly on a Mac running IE5.5 on OS 9, probably because that's what the Macromedia devs all ran/tested with. Anything el

For the longest time, Flash only ran correctly on a Mac running IE5.5 on OS 9, probably because that's what the Macromedia devs all ran/tested with. Anything else, and not only would the frame rate suffer, but Strong Bad's words would gradually desync from his mouth movements. It wouldn't surprise me if critical parts of the Flash plugin were written directly in PowerPC assembly, and then the developers sighed and said "well, we have to port this to WinDoze, so we may as well just rewrite these bits in C++" because x86 gave them the ick and all the cool kids ran a G4 supercomputer with Velocity Engine anyway. They fixed this some time in Flash's twilight years, and CPUs got so fast that the frame rate issues kind of went away on their own. But making large chunks of the web experience depend on a piece of such flaky, proprietary software was not the wisest move the internet made.

keyle 2y ago
Yeah that's the old, old days, and it certainly was the case of Macromedia being a smaller company back then, limited resources etc.
egypturnash 2y ago
Flash did not run terribly well on OS9 Macs either. I was working in the Flash animation scene in the 00's and I spent a couple weeks suffering some bugs that only popped up on the Mac editor with large files. Load huge FLA, make a couple edits, Flash 5 crashes. And it somehow manages to crash so hard that it immediately falls over if I try to run it again, I had to reboot the whole damn OS9 Mac. Which was one of those "cool G4 supercomputers". Load huge FLA, make an edit, immediately save, maybe get a couple more edits, crash, reboot, swear, swear, swear. This bug didn't exist in v4 of the editor but there was no backwards compatibility, so we were stuck. After a while I stopped swearing out loud and just wrote FUCK on a post-it and stuck it to the bezel of my monitor; I think I had a couple of layers of those by the time I was done. Enough to take them off and stick them up on my window and form the word FLASH. Eventually the studio acquired a Windows box (we were an all-Mac shop) and found that this bug didn't exist on there. We were not happy about this discovery. Audio sync was terrible across the whole Flash platform too, by default all the audio was not synced with the frame draws, and if a frame took too long to draw it would not skip ahead. There were workarounds to be discovered but they were obscure and often treated as secret knowledge by people who wanted an edge over other animation studios, I never disassembled any Strongbad Emails but I wouldn't be surprised if the Brothers Chaps never found them until they went off to Hollywood for a while.

keyle 2y ago

Yeah that's the old, old days, and it certainly was the case of Macromedia being a smaller company back then, limited resources etc.

egypturnash 2y ago

Flash did not run terribly well on OS9 Macs either. I was working in the Flash animation scene in the 00's and I spent a couple weeks suffering some bugs that only popped up on the Mac editor with large files. Load huge FLA, make a couple edits, Flash 5 crashes. And it somehow manages to crash so hard that it immediately falls over if I try to run it again, I had to reboot the whole damn OS9 Mac. Which was one of those "cool G4 supercomputers". Load huge FLA, make an edit, immediately save, maybe get a couple more edits, crash, reboot, swear, swear, swear. This bug didn't exist in v4 of the editor but there was no backwards compatibility, so we were stuck. After a while I stopped swearing out loud and just wrote FUCK on a post-it and stuck it to the bezel of my monitor; I think I had a couple of layers of those by the time I was done. Enough to take them off and stick them up on my window and form the word FLASH. Eventually the studio acquired a Windows box (we were an all-Mac shop) and found that this bug didn't exist on there. We were not happy about this discovery. Audio sync was terrible across the whole Flash platform too, by default all the audio was not synced with the frame draws, and if a frame took too long to draw it would not skip ahead. There were workarounds to be discovered but they were obscure and often treated as secret knowledge by people who wanted an edge over other animation studios, I never disassembled any Strongbad Emails but I wouldn't be surprised if the Brothers Chaps never found them until they went off to Hollywood for a while.