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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Next, Flash emulation running under WebAsm?

This exists as Ruffle [1] and is coming along quite well.

The lead developer is a Newgrounds employee (Mike Welsh) and is the author of Swivel [2], a Flash to video converter already in use on Newgrounds. They're targeting both browsers and the desktop with Rust and WebAssembly, and it can already run most basic Flash animations I've tested.

I personally am very excited, having grown up in the Flash era of the Internet, where everything from online coding languages (Scratch) to authors' websites (J.K. Rowling, others) to games and webcomics (take your pick) were made in Flash. Flash was such a universal medium that there's still significant amounts of our Internet history that nobody's converted - or been able to convert - to HTML + JS. And even then, many conversions are buggy and lacking in functionality. Having something like Ruffle available as an extension or a wrapper for legacy websites would be incredible.

If anyone's interested in Ruffle's roadmap, it's available here [3].

[1] https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle

[2] https://github.com/Herschel/Swivel

[3] https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/wiki/Roadmap

That is already under way, check out Ruffle [0] [1] a Flash player emulator written in Rust with WebAssembly.

Newgrounds (sponsoring development of Ruffle) are already using Ruffle on some of their flash content.

[0] https://ruffle.rs

[1] https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle

We are working on that: https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-with...

This sounds like a fascinating approach. How old is your company? Do you already have clients who you've ported stuff to the web for this way that you can share?

The company (Leaning Technologies) exists from 2012. This specific technology is new and we have multiple commercial early adopters already signed up. We also provide porting tools from C++/Java to Javascript/WebAssembly which are mature and used by many customers.

I don't think Adobe ever open-sourced the Flash codebase, right?

The attempts at building something compatible like shumway have all been rather unsuccessful.

Even if the code was available, porting it to WASM would probably be a pretty big task.

It would be great to retain access to the huge amount of flash content out there though.

Not having the source code sucks, but it's not a showstopper ; some videogame preservation websites have managed to workaround this issue.

It's possible to play "Prince of Persia" in the browser (through DOSBOX recompiled to Javascript).

It's even possible to play the original Windows 95 (!) Pinball in the browser. Seeing the Windows 95 cloudy boot sequence in a Javascript canvas is disturbing. The game isn't as smooth as native, but it's definitely playable. ( https://classicreload.com/win9x-3d-pinball-space-cadet.html )

The opcode’s were documented, and tools like Haxe do compile to swf. There is a lot of information available about the scripting part, but indeed it would be a great task. However I can’t wait to compile some C++ code using FlasCC [1] and run that in a wasm player.

[1] https://labs.adobe.com/technologies/alchemy/

Yeah, if I remember right they couldn't open source parts of it because some parts had other licenses in it. I'm recalling (but I could be wrong) that they wanted to in 2011 or so... but couldn't because of that. Don't remember the source though.

> The attempts at building something compatible like shumway have all been rather unsuccessful.

Alternative proprietary implementation was rather successful for game development. Sadly Scaleform GFx is now discontinued too and obviously we'll never see Autodesk publish anything under open source license.

I wish Adobe would start making publications though, they know Flash has been end-of-life for ages yet there's a lot of earlier internet media still in that format.

Flash is now Animate.

> I don't think Adobe ever open-sourced the Flash codebase, right?

This shows we should only allow technologies on the web if they have a clear path to preservation.

I think a similar thing should hold for DRM'ed video. Such videos may be supported on the web, but we should demand they lose their DRM when their copyright expires.

Or just Flash running under a FLOSS implementation of Flash in the browser?

Between GNU Gnash [1] and Lightspark [2] one should be able to run quite a few of those (non v10) Flash programs.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/ [2] https://lightspark.github.io/

Yes, Flash's revenge, WebAssembly + WebGL/WebGPU.

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