[HN Gopher] Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive
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Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive
Author : tosh
Score : 166 points
Date : 2020-11-19 20:44 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.archive.org)
| jonah-archive wrote:
| Really excited about this, and so happy we were able to roll it
| out before Flash's official deprecation at the end of the year.
| If you have old SWFs you'd like to share, these are the
| directions for uploading them so that they'll be emulated in-
| browser:
| https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/datahub/Uploading_SWFs_for...
| [deleted]
| bozzcl wrote:
| Congrats! Flash games and videos were a huge part of my
| childhood. It's heartwarming to see people dedicated to
| preserve such a treasure trove of the older internet.
| Causality1 wrote:
| So this is real emulation, not just transcription into a video
| format? The vectorized and infinitely-scalable aspect of Flash
| is preserved? That's awesome.
| jonah-archive wrote:
| Yes! See krapp's comment below -- we're using the Ruffle
| flash emulator targeted to WASM
| sarah180 wrote:
| Not a flash in the pan after all!
| mortenjorck wrote:
| The museum-docent write-ups for the featured SWFs are the perfect
| icing on this archival cake. I never knew there was a debate over
| the species of onion in Leekspin!
|
| A side note, and perhaps this is down to Safari's imperfect WASM
| support, but I'm not getting any sound in Safari.
| Borlands wrote:
| Amazing work as ever from the archive! Thank you and congrats
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| Programming a shitty AS2 "catch the falling object" game with the
| cheesiest story and uploading it to Newgrounds got me into
| programming. Might never have if not for Flash.
| catmanjan wrote:
| Same here - AS2 and the flash movieclip editor had the perfect
| learning curve for me - I wonder what the current equivalent
| is, if any
| hobby-coder-guy wrote:
| Roblox or Minecraft maybe
| k2xl wrote:
| same here. i got into AS2 in highschool and built many flash
| games. some people still play them and our sad it won't be
| playable on chrome by end of the year
| daveslash wrote:
| Same here. Got into AS1 in high school, back before Adobe
| acquired Macromedia.
| Confiks wrote:
| There's an enormous cache of historic SWFs hosted here [1] and it
| would be awesome if the Internet Archive could archive them, so
| they won't get lost. However, there are far too many to
| individually add.
|
| My personal favorites would be the Demented Cartoon Movie [2],
| Weebl and Bob's transdimensional portal [3] (which is located
| under the stairs) and of course The End of the World [4]. They
| all load perfectly in Ruffle [5].
|
| [1] https://locker.phinugamma.org/swf/
|
| [2] SWF:
| https://locker.phinugamma.org/swf/albinoblacksheep/demented%... |
| Video: https://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/demented
|
| [3]
| http://www.venue.nu/infusions/the_kroax/uploads/movies/Weebl...
|
| [4] SWF:
| https://locker.phinugamma.org/swf/albinoblacksheep/end%28www... |
| Video: https://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/end
|
| [5] https://ruffle.rs/demo/
| [deleted]
| vr46 wrote:
| OMG Internet Archive take my money now, well done, and thank you.
|
| (https://archive.org/donate/ in case anyone else is feeling
| generous)
| OmarShehata wrote:
| You should donate to the project making this possible too!
|
| https://github.com/sponsors/Herschel
| [deleted]
| zebracanevra wrote:
| Hopefully some collaboration can be made between swfchan and the
| IA. swfchan claims to have 217753 flashes: http://swfchan.com/
| (Edit: NSFW. Would recommend an adblocker before opening, at
| least.)
|
| It archives flashes (and their threads!) from /f/ and others. A
| great historical resource.
|
| The presentation of swfchan may not be for everyone, but it does
| hold an immense amount of data.
| textfiles wrote:
| I like how you answered the question of why they're not up yet.
| But yes, I'd like chan-like flashes to be able to live on in
| some way.
| simlevesque wrote:
| watch out I clicked on the first link on swfchan and got a lady
| furiously masturbating on my screen, at work.
|
| > A great historical resource.
|
| I wouldn't say great. It's a virus nest.
| mcphage wrote:
| While mini retro consoles are still all the rage, a retro console
| that has a flash emulator, with a keyboard, mouse, and a vast
| database of classic SWFs, would be awesome.
| superkuh wrote:
| What I don't understand is why google is intentionally excluding
| .swf results from search results. Okay, fine, you don't want it
| in Chrome that's your choice. But not indexing .swf in your
| search engine product because you don't support it in your
| browser product is crazy. It's going out of their way, doing more
| work, to hurt people.
|
| I guess this is just another example of being unable to count on
| profit motivated corporations. It's a good thing the IA is trying
| to help.
| acdha wrote:
| All major browsers have sunset support for Flash and it's moved
| behind increasingly strict warnings over the years. Since
| Google Search is a web application, there's not much value in
| giving people content they can't use.
| untog wrote:
| What would Google index? Can you even decipher the contents of
| a SWF to get keywords out of it?
| siggen wrote:
| Yes, Adobe publishes SWF specs. You can extract text, links,
| pictures, etc. out.
| captbaritone wrote:
| They are not supported in most browsers. Most users are going
| to have a bad experience if they load a page with Flash, and it
| makes sense to down-rank pages that will deliver a bad
| experience.
| superkuh wrote:
| Most file types are not supported in browsers. Only a few
| are. A "download file" dialog is not a bad experience.
| Treating .swf like a normal file type would both be easier
| and better in all ways.
| spijdar wrote:
| Flash will not be supported in any of the large browsers
| after December, limiting access to people who go out of
| their way to use both a fork that preserves NPAPI or
| whatever Chromium uses and manually install some version of
| Flash.
|
| I'm not aware of any search engines that index arbitrary
| files that the browser or some ubiquitous media viewer
| can't open. The most annoying I can think of is the
| occasional powerpoint files I've run across on google, and
| at least those are usually cached in a browser-friendly
| format.
|
| It'd be like indexing Adobe CS project files, and requiring
| a subscription to Adobe to open the search result.
| krapp wrote:
| Using an open source Flash emulator written in Rust and exported
| to Webassembly[0].
|
| [0]https://ruffle.rs/
| jchw wrote:
| As a sidenote, I've taken some brief dives into Ruffle and it
| looks very good. There's great attention to detail everywhere.
| I hope it has a long future.
|
| I've previously also taken brief dives into Lightspark and even
| submitted a minor PR or two. Lightspark is cool, but I feel
| Ruffle is already surpassing it in regards.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| All Your Base Are Belong To Us... preserved forever:
|
| https://archive.org/details/flash_allyourbase
| pier25 wrote:
| _What you say!!_
| pier25 wrote:
| The End of the World:
|
| https://archive.org/details/endoftheworld_flash
| echelon wrote:
| I haven't seen this in over a decade. Everything in this
| Internet Archive collection is bringing back so many memories.
|
| Flash gave creators so much more latitude than YouTube and
| whatever it is that Steve Jobs wanted for us. We've really lost
| something.
|
| Facebook, Platforms, ... we had so much more free-form
| creativity back in the golden era of the web. It's a shame.
|
| Flash, despite not being open source, was really amazing and
| nothing has filled its place.
| jedberg wrote:
| I would have been disappointed if their examples didn't include
| BadgerBadger. And they even have the original version! You can
| tell because if you let it loop for about 5 minutes the audio and
| video no longer match.
| roca wrote:
| What reason is there to believe that Ruffle will succeed where
| other Flash emulators (Shumway, Swiffy, Lightspark, ...) have
| (apparently) failed?
| textfiles wrote:
| I wouldn't say Lightspark has failed at all, they're
| progressing nicely. Others are too.
|
| I heard a rumor Shumway was abandoned as a project by Mozilla
| because ex-Adobe engineers were steering the project and Adobe
| issued concerns; they probably could have been worked out, but
| you know, Mozilla. Since then, Flash has been end of life'd
| more aggressively, so I think Shumway could return.
|
| Flash files should be like music or graphic files - playable in
| a variety of players and items. Even VLC someday, we could
| hope.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| Would love to see the Larry Carlson flash animations make it onto
| here. I was able to track down the page where they used to live
| on the wayback machine [0] (some other pages under that domain
| would also have had some flash animations, too), but don't know
| how to grab the actual SWFs, if it's even possible any more.
|
| [0]:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20190803102822/http://trippywonde...
| Aardwolf wrote:
| Newgrounds is also doing a good job of making many of even their
| interactive Flash animations compatible with modern browsers,
| which is great! I hope they'll be able to extend this to the
| games too
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Shoutout to Madness Combat.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1aubPfepmg
|
| Kids today won't know the pain of not being able to see 50 small
| stick figures trying to pummel each other at >15fps.
|
| Also Flash was one of the best dev environments in history, in my
| opinion. More precisely, one of the most _accessible_ , which
| most dev environments lack.
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(page generated 2020-11-19 23:00 UTC)