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A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

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61–70 of 135 posts

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#61
People think of it as being for games, but high quality applications used it as UI, a lot still do.

Flash was banned to protect the Google, Apple, Microsoft ap ecosystems. Todays mobile CPUs are an order of magnitude way more powerful than those of 10 years ago. The performance issue doesn't apply now.

As for bugs, they can be fixed and they could have been fixed with the passage of time.

The whole agenda of aiming to replace Flash with HTML5 and CSS was a dishonest fraud from the get go.

10 years on now and still nowhere near what was available 10 years ago.

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just having fun when I wrote it. Just saw his twitter feed... wow...

To be honest I did see some conspiracy stuff on his website, but I decided to ignore it and just focus on the beautiful Flash animations. Not sure how I feel about it.

I don't think you should feel bad for admiring his work. I'd hesitantly say that he may have some mental troubles and we should rather feel bad for him, which I personally do, sincerely. It's like how many admired TempleOS.

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#63
post #38
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think anything feature-wise is missing on the runtime side, but Flash’s keyframe/editor setup just let people make the most amazing things.

Isn't Adobe Animate the same thing, keyframes and everything, just with html output?

It also supports Javascript now, and they seemed to have deprecated AS1 & 2 support. I've even seen some TS definitions on the internet.

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just having fun when I wrote it. Just saw his twitter feed... wow...

To be honest I did see some conspiracy stuff on his website, but I decided to ignore it and just focus on the beautiful Flash animations. Not sure how I feel about it.

Whew, "some" is putting it lightly.

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#65

What do you mean, a Flash player emulator ? There's no real CPU to emulate in the first place. Shouldn't we call that a Flash player ? Or is this because of trademark or something?

To get to 100% fidelity, there'll be a Windows XP + IE 6 on x86 emulator in there sooner rather than later.

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#66

People think of it as being for games, but high quality applications used it as UI, a lot still do. Flash was banned to protect the Google, Apple, Microsoft ap ecosystems. Todays mobile CPUs are an order of magnitude way more powerful than those of 10 years ago. The performance issue doesn't apply now. As for bugs, they can be fixed and they could have been fixed with the passage of time. The whole agenda of aiming t…

I miss Flash too, but I don't miss the fact that the runtime was only available from a single vendor and only in binary form for the platforms they deemed important. The performance issue was never the main problem.

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#67
post #11

I first heard about this project when it saved homestarrunner.com from the dead. I'm glad it exists, there's a lot of 2000's-era web history wrapped up in Flash.

Homestarrunner was mostly not interactive so they could have just converted everything to video (I bet it is on YouTube already).

It is on YouTube. But there's a _lot_ of Easter eggs in the Strong Bad Emails that rely on interactivity which are lost in the video.

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#68
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats missing from modern tools?

It's a combination of a lot of things. In theory, Adobe Animate still exists today, but it's wildly inaccessible both because of cost and its proprietary nature. There's also complications based on how PWA get deployed to mobile, etc... But ignoring all of that, here's a quick list of (some) categories of things I still miss from Flash: - nested animations/clips: The recursive nature of Flash made making animations v…

[deleted]

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#69

Ok, funny story about ruffle: Years ago in 2012 some co-workers stumbled on the greatest website ever: http://www.novalight.net/NOVALIGHT.html (takes a while to load now) To prove that HTML5/CSS3 was finally ready, I started a side project to recreate it in JS: https://github.com/jtwaleson/NovaLight-Challenge . I never got far and I don't know if that means I never finish side projects or if Flash is officially super…

So wait, you tried to rebuild a flash website in javascript for the purpose of drawing conclusions about HTML5? How does that work? I mean, Flash and HTML5 are made for different purposes and use cases and HTML5 is not JavaScript.

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#70

Ok, funny story about ruffle: Years ago in 2012 some co-workers stumbled on the greatest website ever: http://www.novalight.net/NOVALIGHT.html (takes a while to load now) To prove that HTML5/CSS3 was finally ready, I started a side project to recreate it in JS: https://github.com/jtwaleson/NovaLight-Challenge . I never got far and I don't know if that means I never finish side projects or if Flash is officially super…

So wait, you tried to rebuild a flash website in javascript for the purpose of drawing conclusions about HTML5? How does that work? I mean, Flash and HTML5 are made for different purposes and use cases and HTML5 is not JavaScript.

Obviously the replacement needed a combination of HTML5/CSS3/JS.
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