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Comment by yoodenvranx | Hacker News Reader

Is there any attempt to save all the classic Flash animations and games like they did with old arcade games? Any "emulators" which can be used to preserve them?

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There are a lot of serious attempts underway, I've been involved with some of those discussions.

Nothing perfect and turn key exists at the moment, but all the necessary pieces are basically there.

It depends on what sort of preservation strategy you're going after.

1) "Emulation" style:

-- Open source flash player (a la Shumway)

2) "Automated Conversion" style:

-- Load-time conversion to a different format (ie, HTML5)-- Ahead-of-time conversion to a different format

3) Convert by hand

-- Rewrite in JS/HTML5

-- Rewrite in Haxe using a library like OpenFL (Haxe compiles to JS/HTML5, C++, also Flash)

There's a lot of options available, and a lot of useful primitives. Parsing and rendering Flash (SWF) content is basically solved (OpenFL has made particular strong strides in this area, Shumway is impressive too).

The really big missing piece is ActionScript execution. There are in fact various open source ActionScript VM's out there, and there are ways to parse ABC (Action Script Byte Code) and convert it -- either ahead of time or at load-time -- to something else, whether that's directly to JS, or something like Haxe (which then compiles it to JS or C++ or whatever), but to my knowledge nobody has a working solution that as of today combines Rendering + ActionScript Execution + RigorouslyTestedConvenientUX.

But all the pieces are there. You just need someone motivated enough and well funded enough to put it all together. Hopefully this news spurs that fire.

ActionScript3 (or AVM2) is fairly well documented and Shumway did a fairly good job executing ABC files, I think we got to like 99%+ compatibility on the reference tests. Getting Rendering + Timeline + Library working correctly, ... that's another story. You have to bug-for-bug compatible AND do different things for different versions of SWF and AVM versions. If anyone needs a decent emulation of AVM2 bytecode, Shumway has a pretty good one in there.

I have seen experiment who took the code base of Redtamarin (based on AVM2 sources)

https://github.com/Corsaair/redtamarin

and added native implementations to render UI with OpenGL API, QT API, etc.

Now, even if it is technically feasible it is not like providing a plugin for the browsers, so that would be mainly to target desktop GUI apps which Adobe AIR is already doing very well.

As for converting the whole Flash API to HTML5/JS, some parts could be done but many parts would be missing or would be impossible to port because the Browser API can not support some of those, TCP/UDP sockets for example (possible with chrome non-standard API but then does not work everywhere).

No need for converting existing SWF files - you will be able to play them after 2020 using the Flash Player Standalone Projector or Swiff Player.

There's nothing stopping you from just running Flash itself… even in a Windows XP VM if necessary.

I really don't get the downvotes here. Yes, there are umpteen ways to run a Flash program. But if you goal is "preserve the experience of running a Flash program for future generations", the most obvious solution is to simply emulate the platform on which Flash runs. (This solution also has the benefits of being simple and a solved problem, which the GP admits is not true of other solutions.)

Proposing to preserve Flash apps through a bytecode emulator is frankly somewhat absurd if you consider analogies. HTML 2.0 sites don't render on modern browsers either, but no-one seriously proposes maintaining a modern HTML 2.0 browser to view them. They simply run an old copy of Netscape Navigator, in a Windows 95 VM if necessary. Likewise with old BASIC programs on an Apple 2: no-one (from a preservation standpoint) runs them on an AppleSoft BASIC emulator; they run them on real AppleSoft BASIC inside an emulated Apple 2.

Some kind of conversion is needed to help hosts keep their flash content alive - visitors will ignore what is not accessible.

Yes, but that's not the problem the GP was addressing.

There are several open source player implementations, but they're quite incomplete so far:

  * Lightspark http://lightspark.github.io/
  * Shumway http://mozilla.github.io/shumway/
  * Gnash https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/

I used to work at a company called Spaceport.io (now defunct) where we had a nearly complete implementation. It included an impressive GPU-accelerated renderer and an optimising compiler from AS3 to JavaScript—we could run on mobile, desktop, and even WebGL, and do neat things like update over WiFi instead of USB during development.

It was intended for Flash game development, and worked pretty well for that purpose. Unfortunately, we spent a lot of time dealing with large customers who wanted to use it to port existing Flash games to mobile, which was basically a neverending treadmill of having to implement obscure features that they didn’t even know they were relying on. :/

Parts of it have been open-sourced, but I wish the parent company would just release the whole thing. Last I knew, there was one guy maintaining it for one customer after the main engineers were acquihired.

I see one of the investors was the BBC - so that's where my licence fee goes :)

" neverending treadmill of having to implement obscure features that they didn’t even know they were relying on,"

I been coding emulators for fun (i.e. NES, Scratch) and it's been an interesting journey with all the gotcha's involved - however I don't think I have the motivation for any flash based ones, the only exception I've worked on my scratch2apk emulator (javascript) which has plenty of games going for it!

Who's the parent company? I know some stakeholders who would be very interested in hearing about this.

YouWeb, an incubator. It was shut down in ~2013, but I think still exists to own the IP of the startups. The person to contact would probably be the owner, Peter Relan; I dunno what he’s doing these days.

The GNU Project wrote a version of Flash. That might be helpful in the preservation of flash animations. https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/

From what I recall there were quite a few, most of them discontinued: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Wallaby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shumway_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Swiffy

There's also https://github.com/tobytailor/gordon/wiki

I guess most of them are more or less dead :-/

Arcade emulators emulate the arcade hardware itself, not any bytecode which the arcade games may be written in (such as the TI-99/4's GPL [1]). For preservation purposes, it is likely that Flash is preserved likewise (by emulating the PC platform, rather than Flash bytecode). This is the easiest way to ensure exact reproduction of the original execution.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A#VDP...

There was a good attempt (Mozilla Shumway), but Mozilla for some reason dropped it. I guess it was too resource draining, and wasn't their core priority.

Aren't there standalone flash player desktop applications?

It's called Flash Player projector, available from here: http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads.htm...

It's called Adobe AIR and can also deploy to iOS and Android devices.

I seem to recall there was a way to play .swf files without a browser. It might be cool to see a standalone flash player, maybe a little like the Electron framework.

Isn't that what Adobe Air was? http://www.adobe.com/products/air.html

Letting flash run outside the browser sandbox, what could go wrong?

> Letting flash run outside the browser sandbox, what could go wrong?

It would be like any other desktop application. You're running code of which you presumably know and trust the provenance. It's not like a malware Flash ad written by someone who found a security hole in the Flash player, that is loaded into a random web page by an unsuspecting user.

Except on Chrome, Flash always ran outside the sandbox, AFAIK.

'Ran outside the sandbox on everything other than Chrome', or 'on Chrome, Flash ran outside the sandbox'? Your comment seems a little ambiguous to me.

The flash player itself can be launched standalone. On Linux Adobe provides a separate archive with a flashplayer executable that launches it without a browser : https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/2...

I recall seeing it on Windows too.

How come? It will stop receiving updates, not end.

there is gnash on Linux.

I've used it in the past. It works, sometimes. I wonder if it is still actively developed?

It's open source, so it can be developed at any point. I have not looked at it recently, though.

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