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Internet Archive expands Flash support

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Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#221

Post by willio58 »

justinclift wrote: post #116
Alifatisk wrote: post #27

Part of me feel sad that the big players deprecated flash before any good alternatives popped up, HTML5 wasn't exactly an alternative yet. Flash was waaay more powerful, I think we lost a bit of good technology there. Hopefully we'll get it back soon.

I'm also interested in seeing what happens with Ruffle can eventually play all (or say 99%) of the Flash files out there. Will they continue on, and make a "next generation flash" or something? aka Flash Done Right :)

The doors have been open for quite some time now for someone to build Flash Done Right. Some have tried. But they never catch on.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#222

Post by cpeterso »

kmeisthax wrote: post #217
cpeterso wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a software developer of the Flash Player team at Macromedia and Adobe, specifically on the team porting it to Windows CE/PocketPC and then Android. What you describe is correct as far as I can remember, though I hadn’t heard the Apple “begged” Adobe to support iPhone. I know that Adobe shared the Flash Player source code with Apple, but heard Apple assigned an intern to try porting it to iPhone. The Adobe devel…

I'm not sure exactly how to properly cite Apple's side of the story anymore, since it was from a Twitter thread that I don't know how to search for[0]. I know there was something on InternalTechEmails as well but I'm too afraid to touch Elon's Musk anymore. Apple throwing "port Flash Player and HW accelerate it" to an intern also tracks. Especially if this was early iPhone development where basically half the company…

> Are you telling me that there was a Flash Player equivalent of Mac OS Copland[2]'s development at some point?

Yes, though these projects focused on “sidecar” JITs that would live alongside the legacy ActionScript VM inside the same Flash Player, not replacing the sacred Flash renderer.

A successful example was AVM2, the AS3 VM (open sourced in partnership with Mozilla as Tamarin [1]). A few years before that, a team had evaluated whether the .NET JIT (or a cleanroom implementation developed in-house) was technically and legally an option.

Much later, long after I had left, I heard from friends still at Adobe that somehow JVM developers from Oracle had joined the Flash team in the mid-2010s and were eager to attempt yet another VM, based on their JVM experience. But by this time, Adobe no longer wanted to invest in modernizing the Flash platform when it could simply milk the cash cow.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarin_(software)

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#223

Post by cpeterso »

cpeterso wrote: post #222
kmeisthax wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure exactly how to properly cite Apple's side of the story anymore, since it was from a Twitter thread that I don't know how to search for[0]. I know there was something on InternalTechEmails as well but I'm too afraid to touch Elon's Musk anymore. Apple throwing "port Flash Player and HW accelerate it" to an intern also tracks. Especially if this was early iPhone development where basically half the company…

> Are you telling me that there was a Flash Player equivalent of Mac OS Copland[2]'s development at some point? Yes, though these projects focused on “sidecar” JITs that would live alongside the legacy ActionScript VM inside the same Flash Player, not replacing the sacred Flash renderer. A successful example was AVM2, the AS3 VM (open sourced in partnership with Mozilla as Tamarin [1]). A few years before that, a tea…

btw, the source code for Flash Player 4 is available on the Internet Archive. That was before my time at Macromedia, but I heard that Macromedia either open sourced the code (and then changed their mind for Flash Player 5 when they started charging for source code access) or it has been shared with a partner company who leaked it. Supposedly a few Korean electronics companies included this Flash Player 4 code in their devices when Macromedia was trying to sell Flash Lite (also a fork of Flash Player 4) as an solution for mobile phone UIs.

I know Adobe will never open source the final Flash Player code (because of third-party code licenses and there’s nothing for Adobe to gain), but I wish they had at least open sourced their internal test suite so open source players could improve their Flash compatibility.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#224

Post by rincebrain »

kmeisthax wrote: post #216
rincebrain wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want you to know that I laughed very hard at finding a comment complaining about Homestuck in Ruffle unexpectedly here, thank you. To be fair, on the single 100 mbit link the site used to be on, for new things being posted, that would be historically accurate...

[S] Cascade and [S] ACT 4 were my test cases for the "large movies hang the browser" bug[0]. Homestuck loves stressing out Ruffle's tessellator. Oh and yes, the opening bars of "Doctor" are permanently burned into my head now. [0] https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/pull/7858

It's okay, Cascade was a great test case for Newgrounds, too. ;)

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#225

Post by justinclift »

willio58 wrote: post #221
justinclift wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also interested in seeing what happens with Ruffle can eventually play all (or say 99%) of the Flash files out there. Will they continue on, and make a "next generation flash" or something? aka Flash Done Right :)

The doors have been open for quite some time now for someone to build Flash Done Right. Some have tried. But they never catch on.

That's a good point. It'd need both widespread adoption of the player, and some kind of good authoring environment.

Interestingly enough, the Ruffle player itself is looking like it'll achieve that wide spread adoption. If a "Flash Done Right" type of thing was included in that by default, then it'd just leave the authoring tools piece missing.

Others have pointed out that Godot has timeline functionality similar to the old Flash (authoring) interface. So maybe the authoring tools piece would mean existing authoring tools (like Godot) would be able to add a "Flash Done Right" output target and call it a day.

Seems like an approach that would work.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#226

Post by mwcampbell »

genewitch wrote: post #209
mwcampbell wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We created all kinds of training content in it How accessible was that training content for disabled people, particularly blind people with screen readers? Or was it about tasks that are inherently visual? Plain text is better in some ways.

were blind people with screen readers repairing printers?

No, but I didn't know if the person I was replying to was also creating training content for any other tasks.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#227

Post by j45 »

dylan604 wrote: post #210
j45 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truthfully though, what wasn't a security nightmare back then in some way? Doesn't negate what you said just actually trying to think of some positive rich media app technologies.

>Truthfully though, what wasn't a security nightmare back then in some way? Collecting data from a form sent via POST to be processed server side?

Haha, touché.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#228

Post by andai »

hoten wrote: post #82
nathants wrote: post #63

working on a game right now. the second to last attempt was in godot 4. it reminded me a lot of flash, especially in 2d mode. to anyone missing flash go checkout godot!

PIXI.js also gives a similar framework.

Have you used Phaser? I was under the impression that Pixi is just the graphics part, while Phaser (which uses Pixi) handles everything else.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#229

Post by hoten »

andai wrote: post #228
hoten wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PIXI.js also gives a similar framework.

Have you used Phaser? I was under the impression that Pixi is just the graphics part, while Phaser (which uses Pixi) handles everything else.

I have not, so I'm not very familiar. PIXI provides Stage / DisplayObject / Sprite APIs that would be familiar to Flash programmers.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#230

Post by adrian17 »

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

(Ruffle dev here)

We took a look at `Home Run Derby` specifically and found some bugs and inefficiencies - the most recent builds should run faster and hopefully crash less :)

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