Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Internet Archive expands Flash support

mastodon.archive.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 231 posts

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#51

Post by db48x »

lucgommans wrote: post #11
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 documen…

If you prefer JSON you can also visit https://archive.org/metadata/gravityrunner-nolimit>.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#52

Post by a1o »

Does anyone how to do this? I could tie existing wasm runtimes to some binaries that supports it (mostly old abandon ware games there that aren't flash), but when I asked around in forums no one answered there - or I didn't understood how their communities worked.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#53

Post by bsimpson »

themagician wrote: post #40
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…

Flash was a great technology for so many reasons. I really wish Adobe had open sourced it at the end. I suspect it would have paid dividends somehow. Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage. I was working with Adobe when the iPhone came out and they did have dev versions where it was running, but it was awful. Visibly laggy, nearly unusable. No real thought into UI mapping f…

Flash was epic for creative coding, and I haven't seen another software environment come close. We lost a really great onramp to UI development when Flash died.

I suspect there are deep licensing problems with the Flash codebase. For instance, video was such a heavy investment for them towards the end, and I'm sure they licensed plenty of that tech. I wonder how usable it would be if they just open-sourced the parts they owned free-and-clear.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#54

Post by bsimpson »

derefr wrote: post #32
TillE wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those were fun gimmicks and all, but Homestar Runner worked because of the cute character designs, funny writing, and Matt's genuinely outstanding voice acting. It holds up just fine on YouTube. It was more about Flash being a really powerful tool for amateur animators, and coming at a time when you didn't have much else in the way of video on the internet.

Yeah, but there was a reason that we "didn't have much else in the way of video on the internet" at the time — bitmapped videos were far too bandwidth-intensive for most people to download in realtime . (You could still download them, and people sometimes did; but a 3-minute, 240p MPEG1/RealPlayer clip was something you'd need to dedicate a half-hour to fetching, either using a download manager or Limewire. It was no…

Hanna Barbera is another famous aethetic driven from logistical considerations.

Every HB character wears a tie or a necklace because it provides a seam to separate the head from the body. You can have a bunch of Wilma or Yogi heads that reuse a single body. Lets you animate dialog without having to redraw literally everything.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#55

Post by codetrotter »

Apocryphon wrote: post #20

Does this mean that previously archived sites that use Flash will now be viewable?

Hope this means that I can play Attak by Johnny Two Shoes again.

https://web.archive.org/web/20161126122429/http://www.johnny...

There was a time when I used to play that game every day.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#56

Post by goosedragons »

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…

You can already experience them on homestarrunner.com thanks to ruffles. It emulates the flash player and the old toons seem to work fine. The site even has it built in so no need for an extension.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#57

Post by themagician »

bsimpson wrote: post #53
themagician wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash was a great technology for so many reasons. I really wish Adobe had open sourced it at the end. I suspect it would have paid dividends somehow. Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage. I was working with Adobe when the iPhone came out and they did have dev versions where it was running, but it was awful. Visibly laggy, nearly unusable. No real thought into UI mapping f…

Flash was epic for creative coding, and I haven't seen another software environment come close. We lost a really great onramp to UI development when Flash died. I suspect there are deep licensing problems with the Flash codebase. For instance, video was such a heavy investment for them towards the end, and I'm sure they licensed plenty of that tech. I wonder how usable it would be if they just open-sourced the parts…

I don't doubt the licensing and patent issue. But also, it's Adobe. They have the money. Instead of spending tens of millions on ads and media they could just do this.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#58

Post by justsomehnguy »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #42
justsomehnguy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the modern CSS + animations + SVG solves like 90% of things Flash could do, with HTML5 and canvas it solves the remaining 9%. but the biggest problem is the authoring tools and I if there were anything worthwile enough the web would had exploded already.

I'm not sure if it's included in your 90%, but an advantage of Flash is that it was not JS or HTML. Meaning that you could block it easily, when it offended your senses (animated ads, autoplaying videos), without affecting the functionality of most web sites. CSS + animations + JS + HTML5 cannot be blocked without destroying the web site as well.

> CSS + animations + JS + HTML5 cannot be blocked without destroying the web site as well.

That's a lame excuse. There were enough 'not malicious' sites, there are enough sites now what treat you like a 3rd rate netizen even if you are on a 4k desktop in a landscape orientation.

If anything, Web is destro^W profiling itself for a narrow subset of mobile users for quite some years already, so I can't accept your 'blovk Flash' stance as anything having a substinence.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#59

Post by jonplackett »

The thing I still miss about Flash is the authoring tool.

It is one of the few bits of software that bridged a gap between artists and creators and coding in a way that totally democratised creating interactive websites.

I see some similarities with Instagram filters and TikTok effects. The visual-layout-you-can-add-code-to approach, but Flash was so mainstream and capable in a way filters aren’t.

I wish Adobe had done a better job with flash and just converted the Flash Player into html5. Surely that could have been done?

Website creation is far too complicated now compared to then and I think the level of experimentation - especially by lone artists - has plummeted since flash died.

Post reply on HN