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?
there is gnash on Linux.
“We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
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Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#32How is Shumway doing?
More like "How is Mortar Project" doing?
:-(
Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#33I wonder what the major use cases are for Flash Player these days? I assume some of the 'Farm Ville' style web games are probably in Flash still these days.
legacy games & apps
Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#34Is 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?
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.
Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#35Is 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?
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.
Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#36Is 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?
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/Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#37I disabled flash on my browsers in 2014, and I have had to manually reenable it exactly twice in the last three years to get content I needed. Both times were for restaurant menus, of all things.
I have fond memories of newgrounds and the real early explosion of browser games, but I'm not going to miss the lag, memory overhead, and security hell one iota.
Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#38Hate flash however much you want. I learned to program with old ActionScript and wrote my first game as a kid (that actually taught me OOP and laid good foundations for JavaScript which is almost identical). To this day, all the applications I wrote still work perfectly. That's an achievement. Not to mention, Macromedia (later: Adobe) Flash was a fantastic environment for minigames and I haven't yet seen anything replace it properly. I weep for today's children, is there a good alternative? I mean, a program where you can scribble, make a movie clip out of it and make it move with code, just like that. And then publish it on the internet effortlessly.
Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#39I say this every time someone brings up Flash's failure, but ... It's a tragic failure on Adobe's part. The tools for 2D animations and games in Flash are far beyond anything else out there from a creative standpoint. There isn't a product on the market that comes even close. Everything now is too technical, too specialized. There are lots and lots of artists and developers out there who learned Flash's toolset and g…
A lot went downhill after Adobe bought Macromedia. Flash use to be light weight, small and incredibly good for displaying vector graphics. You can scale up older Flash content to 1080p and it still looks great. You can't do that with YouTube videos of older flash content.
Many animation studios still use Flash .. to make their YouTube videos.
It ran on three platforms (Mac, Linux, Win) and was a much better portable web app platform than Java applets.
Sure a lot of newer stuff uses cool Javascript frameworks for making games and vector graphics, but there are a lot of old games people won't be able to play anymore. There's a lot we'll lose once Flash goes away forever, in a way that can't be archived like old Geocities pages (unless someone makes a Flash player in Javascript O_o)
Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#40> will be phased out by the end of 2020. At that point, Adobe will stop updating and distributing Flash. Adobes stance on backwards compatibility in Flash has always been "Don't break the web". Where does this leave all the existing flash content that still exists around the web after 2020? As far as I know, those JS emulators are way to slow for most content.
I assume they're giving everyone 2.5yrs advanced notice to port anything considered important to something else.