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Comment by danbolt | Hacker News Reader

I hope as the web moves on we find an easy way of preserving a lot of the creative work that's been done in Flash.

Some sort of WebGL/asm.js/WebAssembly player for SWFs on the internet archive would be the pipe dream, I think. That way we could watch Strong Bad long after Flash is available in the future.

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There's also GNU Gnash[0] which specifically features Homestar Runner on their homepage.

[0]https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/

That's Mozilla's Shumway, a SWF player in Javascript.

Shumway is DOA without the direct help from Adobe. That's not the first time someones tries to develop an open source flash player. They all failed.

There just wasn't enough work and money put into these open source players.

For instance there is proprietary Flash implementation called Scaleform used for games UI. Even long ago before Autodesk acquired them it's had both decent compatibility with normal SWF as well as full GPU acceleration for every platform possible include Linux.

I've used Scaleform a good amount. It's not 100% compatible with stock Flash but it's pretty darn close in the use cases I've been exposed to.

Scaleform has a complex code base but clearly it is possible to reverse engineer the Flash runtime and make a compatible player.

Shumway's potential is lost now. I would love for Firefox to take on the same model as Chrome and bundle Flash in the browser and Shumway was a half-baked way to do this.

Funny that https://mozilla.github.io/shumway/ makes Chrome crash immediately.

Works for me on Chrome 52 / Linux.

Same here, also on Linux

Hm, to view old content, you can also use the old flashplayer - so nothing is lost. I doubt, that creating a new flash-player on webgl/wasm base is worth the effort, as it would be very complex. (because contrary to popular opinion adobes flash engineers were pretty good)

But you may give it a try ...

There is https://github.com/ienaga/swf2js that works really well.

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