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Internet Archive expands Flash support

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Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#11

Post by lucgommans »

vsnf wrote: post #2

I couldn't find any easily available official notice, but they seem to be using Ruffle[0] [0] https://ruffle.rs/

Announcement: https://blog.archive.org/2020/11/19/flash-animations-live-fo...

> Utilizing an in-development Flash emulator called Ruffle, we have added Flash support to the Internet Archive’s Emularity system, letting a subset of Flash items play in the browser as if you had a Flash plugin installed

I had trouble when adding e.g. https://archive.org/details/gravityrunner-nolimit because there's literally zero documentation on this system that I could find, but the way that it works is that you edit metadata tags (key-value list) and there is some magic/special tags that have an effect on how the item is displayed on the site, like whether to show you the emulator. What you need to set is:

    emulator = ruffle-swf
    emulator_ext = swf
You can find out what others have set by clicking on 'show all' at the download options and choosing the _meta.xml file.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#12

Post by Bakingpotato »

haunter wrote: post #7
samketchup wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just struck out 5 times in a row, finally made solid contact and the game crashed. Thank you, lol

Try not to play fullscreen. Started crashing some months ago. Or download the sfw file and play with the standalone Ruffle.rs client

did you report that to the bug tracker?

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#13

Post by mynameishere »

haunter wrote: post #4

Highly recommend "Winnie the Pooh's Home Run Derby". It's the Dark Souls of flash games https://archive.org/details/homerunderby_en The japanese version is here (no difference) https://archive.org/details/homerun_20201126 They might crash in full screen though (some kind of bug)

Well now I've got that crappy music stuck in my head.

That brings up a real mystery from 15 years ago that I never did solve. Back in the day you could go on kongregate or whatever and play these awful flash games that clearly took 30 minutes or less to make. Just junky, copy-paste stuff. (Much worse than the "home run derby" game above.)

And yet...

And yet they all seemed to have original sound tracks of more-or-less passable game music. Where were they getting this from? Did adobe give everybody a huge catalog of tunes to pick from?

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#14

Post by Bakingpotato »

mynameishere wrote: post #13
haunter wrote: post #4

Highly recommend "Winnie the Pooh's Home Run Derby". It's the Dark Souls of flash games https://archive.org/details/homerunderby_en The japanese version is here (no difference) https://archive.org/details/homerun_20201126 They might crash in full screen though (some kind of bug)

Well now I've got that crappy music stuck in my head. That brings up a real mystery from 15 years ago that I never did solve. Back in the day you could go on kongregate or whatever and play these awful flash games that clearly took 30 minutes or less to make. Just junky, copy-paste stuff. (Much worse than the "home run derby" game above.) And yet... And yet they all seemed to have original sound tracks of more-or-les…

a lot of people tended to get CC0 music, free, and didn't need to make their own though most of the actually good flash games had an artist make music specifically for the game

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#16

Post by CSMastermind »

I was just watching a YouTube video about Home Star Runner yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wbh9-mNmviE

I never watched the series myself but I do remember hearing about it.

In the video essay he talks about how flash videos like Home Star Runner were a unique medium. Not quite passive like a video but not quite interactive like a video game. The videos could be watched passively but also could incorporate interactive elements like minigames, easter eggs, and choose your own adventure stories.

He points out that even when Netflix dipped into the choose your own adventure format they couldn't achieve the same flexibility as a flash animation because if for example they wanted to make a story change that would dye a character's hair blue they couldn't possibly film all the permutations scenes required to propagate that visual difference throughout the story.

But in flash animation you can. You can easily let the audience choose a character's hair color and have that effect the animation for the rest of the story.

The author of that YouTube video made me wish I could experience those cartoons and it makes me happy that places like the IA are making that possible.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#17

Post by Bakingpotato »

CSMastermind wrote: post #16

I was just watching a YouTube video about Home Star Runner yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wbh9-mNmviE I never watched the series myself but I do remember hearing about it. In the video essay he talks about how flash videos like Home Star Runner were a unique medium. Not quite passive like a video but not quite interactive like a video game. The videos could be watched passively but also could incorporate…

yeah, lots of Flash games were actually innovative. plenty of developers got their start on NG with flash before moving on to make console or steam games. flash had plenty of shovelware, but you can still make incredible stuff with it.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#18

Post by lucgommans »

They link to a collection called "Software Library: Flash". How do I add something there? I've uploaded gravityrunner years ago and recently (45 days ago, the site tells me) figured out how to activate the emulator for this swf file (not sure why not offer to emulate any .swf file but ok), but it's also not showing up¹ in things like Flash game collections. Is there any documentation on this?

Edit: wait, I think I found it. Below the About text, there is a filter for "AND primary_collection:softwarelibrary_flash". Probably I need to add that tag to my item. Now I wonder how I'm supposed to know of the relevant collections to put things in? Is there a list of all software categories?

¹ https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash?query=grav... whereas it is on the site-wide search: https://archive.org/search?query=gravityrunner

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#19

Post by Bakingpotato »

lucgommans wrote: post #18

They link to a collection called "Software Library: Flash". How do I add something there? I've uploaded gravityrunner years ago and recently (45 days ago, the site tells me) figured out how to activate the emulator for this swf file (not sure why not offer to emulate any .swf file but ok), but it's also not showing up¹ in things like Flash game collections. Is there any documentation on this? Edit: wait, I think I fo…

not that I've seen. one thing you can try to do is add the Ruffle emulator flags to your metadata, and they'll probably pick it up and place it in that category whenever the next time they do a sweep. I guess you can also email them, hey are pretty prompt by email, usually.
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