New York Times Flash-based visualizations work again | Hacker News Reader

New York Times Flash-based visualizations work again

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128 pointsbookofjoe38 comments

The sponsors section for the open source project they are using is a trip down flash game memory lane: https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/?tab=readme-ov-file#spon...

At this point, "Flash player emulator" is a misnomer. It's a Flash player. It plays Flash content, that's what it does.

How do you mean?

Well, the linked article references Ruffle and "Ruffle is an Adobe Flash Player emulator".

On the other hand "emulator" is usually some hardware emulation. Whereas the flas player was basically a runtime / vm for Flash files. And Ruffle is a different runtime implementation.

It's like saying any non-oracle Java is a "Java emulator".

Scummvm for example follows that line of thought: "ScummVM is a complete rewrite of these games' executables and is not an emulator."

Anyway, given what Ruffle says I would probably side with them....

I mean, but it is a Java emulator.. I was actually thinking of that in my head as an example of an emulator that's non-hardware when I read the first part of your comment. Wine technically Is Not an Emulator by name, but they felt the need to make that distinction despite emulating a piece of software..

> See the box office streamgraph [0] that once upset many

Does anyone know what "upset" this is referring to? Wondering if it had to do with what the data showed or, rather, how it was presented.

0: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008...

Pretty great. First like, other than Internet Archive related activities, thing I've seen using Ruffle. Resurrecting broken content across the web, especially a major archive source like the NYT is pretty great.

Out of curiosity a couple months ago I wondered if I could play my old Proximity flash game on Newgrounds from the browser within the Quest 3 VR headset, and it worked great!

That led me to do a little searching, and I discovered that originally the game didn't work in Ruffle, as I apparently did something with the play game button that wasn't normal. But someone put a fix in it back in 2020[1] in order to get my game working again. That was pretty neat. Felt kind of nice that people still cared enough about my old game to make sure it still works in an emulator.

I'm glad these people are out there, getting these things working again. There's so many great animations and games that didn't deserve to disappear because Adobe decided it was a prudent business move to just drop all Flash support.

Still working on a more in-depth sequel (using Monogame), and I'm way overdue to make a new web version of the original. Might knock that out once I get closer to getting the sequel out there.

EDIT: Just realized Proximity is 20 years old this year. Huh. Probably needs a 20 year anniversary edition.

[1]: https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/pull/1024

That “someone” who made the fix for Proximity is Mike Welsh, who created Ruffle! He has done a lot of work for flash preservation and truly cares about Newgrounds and it’s community. Back in 2013 (when he was actually an employee of Newgrounds) he was the sole programmer on Swivel, probably the best swf-to-mp4 converting tools ever. Every animator I know that uses flash STILL use Swivel to get an MP4 export.

Oh man I loved the podcast you did with Mike for Newgrounds. I had never stopped to think about the fact that Mike had to actually write an entire flash emulator to get Castle Crashers to run on the xbox. It's so clever and genius, shipping users an emulator like that.

To anyone who isn't familiar, here's a link to the podcast:

https://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/935322

haha thanks! Yeah Mike is a real programming wiz and he’s super inspiring! I’ve gone to him for programming help many times but he always tries to get me to learn it on my own than handholding me… lol. He’s one of the nicest people I know :)

That's really awesome. I don't follow these things often enough anymore, so the name didn't look familiar to me. But I'm glad he's put so much effort into Flash preservation.

Wait, can i produce NEW flash content and use Ruffle to emulate/display it?

Yes, of course, why not?

There are quite a bit of limitations, though I haven't looked in much detail besides the quick/casual try to see if they work for some of the works done in ActionScript 3.

I tried running an MMS creator/generator, built for the teams at Nokia (2004-ish, I think), and it didn't work beyond the initial interface. I also tried a K6 science lesson builder app done for teachers backed by Pearson Publishing -- it worked to the extent of some interactivity, but the audio sync, etc, was not. So, I gave up.

I might be missing something, or some setup but I'm not too keen on it, anyways.

Flash was discontinued because Adobe couldn't keep up with the security problems. Is there any expectation that the same won't be true with Ruffle? Perhaps Ruffle doesn't try to do all the powerful/unsafe things that Adobe tried to have Flash do?

Ruffle uses WebAssembly and the associated browser sandbox.

For one thing, Ruffle is written in Rust, which significantly helps with security. The lack of JIT compilation for ActionScript also helps.

The main way Rust helps with security normally doesn't especially apply. The main feature of Rust that Ruffle takes advantage of is just that it can compile to WebAssembly. So it runs in the same browser VM other modern web content does. Thus inheriting all that sandboxing and security. So idt Rust deserves the credit here.

I know, but it also exists as a native desktop app. And I suppose if there are any remaining native plugin interfaces in modern browsers, it can also potentially become a browser plugin.

I’m too young to understand how plugin architecture worked for old browsers (flash, java, what else am I forgetting).

I’m guessing it was some horrible unsafe C interrop mess with close ties to the kernel. Or maybe there was no samdboxing and security built in like there is these days.

Anyone able to shed some light on how it worked and why it was so easy to exploit flash and therefore the whole system? Was it the same for Java applets?

My guess: Flash required installing a native host and browser plugins, while this runs in the browser sandbox which is generally considered very safe (much safer than Flash)

I've always been impressed by this one by Amanda Cox. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010...

So is there open source tools to create flash content. For those that want to skip learning JavaScript/html/css

Have, FlashDevelop, etc. You can probably still find the old versions of Macromedia Flash on Archive.org.

Have? Did you mean Haxe?

I think instead of learning Flash you're better off learning something like Haxe, which originated from an AS2 compiler and is often used to port old Flash projects. A lot of people who used to use Flash to develop games just moved onto Haxe + OpenFL.

Is this meant to just run old Flash or will it make folks create new animations etc?

New projects can run just fine using ruffle, provided you use the APIs that are currently supported by the project (IIRC it's not feature-complete yet for ActionScript 3 and such).

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