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Graphics Classic Games (Games) Games

Flash Is About To Die, But Classic Flash Games Will Live On (fastcompany.com) 45

Posted by EditorDavid from the covering-Newgrounds dept.
Fast Company's technology editor harrymcc writes: After years of growing technical irrelevance and security concerns, the Flash browser plug-in will reach the end of the road on January 12 when Adobe blocks its ability to display content. The web will survive just fine. But there's a huge library of old Flash games — some of them quirky, interesting, and worth preserving. Over at Fast Company, Jared Newman wrote about several grassroots initiatives that will allow us to continue to enjoy these artifacts of the Flash era even after Flash is history.
Some tips from the article:
  • If you have a Windows PC, the best way to replay old Flash content is with FlashPoint, a free program with more than 70,000 web games and 8,000 animations, most of which are Flash-based. (Experimental Mac and Linux versions are also available, but are complicated to set up....)
  • Ruffle is the underlying emulation software that The Internet Archive is using. You can also install it as a standalone program or browser extension...
  • Newgrounds has released its own Flash Player for Windows that safely loads content from its website, so you still get the full experience of using Newgrounds proper.

But the article opens with a sentence reminding us that "After all the challenges of 2020, there's one thing we can all look forward to in the new year: Adobe Flash Player will finally be dead."


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Flash Is About To Die, But Classic Flash Games Will Live On More

Flash Is About To Die, But Classic Flash Games Will Live On

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  • DTD (Score:3)

    by B'Trey ( 111263 ) on Sunday January 03, 2021 @11:51AM (#60890858)

    There is only one important question here: Can I still play Desktop Tower Defense?

  • One of my favorite Flash Games I don't expect will be preserved is Territory War 2 [xgenstudios.com]. I spent many a long night one-on-one with other players playing some amazing battles. It was an awesome, brilliant game combining skill, strategy, luck, and multi-player action. May it rest in peace.

  • How exactly are Adobe going to block it? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Sunday January 03, 2021 @12:18PM (#60890916) Homepage

    Has every version had a built in kill switch all these years? If they have then Adobe kept that quiet and the black hats missed a trick! If not then how else because if its simply a case of a message popping up saying "Download version XX" then anyone who still needs/.wants Flash for whatever reason simply won't do it.

    • I assume that the latest versions of Flash Player had a date kill switch when Adobe announced end of life in 2017. To avoid it you would have to install a previous version from somewhere else on the web as Adobe no longer made those versions available.

      • Re:How exactly are Adobe going to block it? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Sunday January 03, 2021 @01:05PM (#60891066) Homepage

        Well however they may do it , it leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. It shouldn't be up to Adobe to pull the plug, it should be up to the user. But unfortunately making these decisions for us because they think we're not adult enough to make them ourselves is the way the world is going and I for one am not happy about it.

        • It was probably in the EULA somewhere, you did read it before installing right? Thatâ(TM)s the terms by which they are willing to give you their software.

        • So according to you it is not up to the owner and developer of software to decide what they want to do with that software especially when the user pays $0 for it.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Viol8 ( 599362 )

            Yes. If someone gives something to me for free its still mine, payment is irrelevant. HTH.

            • To be clear, your sense of entitlement extends to other people’s software so that it is "yours" even though they never agreed to that provision. Have you ever read any software agreement in your life? Adobe’s license grants you the ability to use; they never gave you ownership. Even open source software like the GPL has limitations on what you can and cannot do.

              • You're so dumb you're confusing source code with a binary. Thanks for playing kid.

                • To be clear, you are claiming Adobe Flash as "yours" even though you paid $0 for it and even though you agreed to the EULA which dictates what Adobe can do (which includes having a kill date). You do understand what a license is right especially one you accepted. You do understand Adobe never transferred any ownership to you? For pointing out that you now are throwing around insults. The question remains: are you that entitled?
    • There are four mecanisms:
      • Adobe asked brower maker to disable flash. They are more than happy to comply. You can overcome this by using plugin enabled browser such as Firefox ESR 52 or Waterfox.
      • Adobe removed all the older version of flash and made sure that you cannot download them on their website
      • Adobe installer has special instruction to deinstall flash from your system starting from january
      • There is probably a nice kill switch is the latest version of the flash plugin itself

      Looks like Adobe is trying

  • Oh, come on, you know Vultan will rescue him at the last moment.

  • Why? (Score:2, Informative)

    by fermion ( 181285 )
    Next we are going to tell you how disable you cars seatbelt beeper because it is more fun to drive without protection. Or the best place to hide your key because it is mor fun to not have to carry keys.

    Flash was critical to the development of the internet not only because it allowed advertisers to hijack your browser, but also because it allowed some innovative content that otherwise could not be realized. But is was also made a time when we did not understand all the risks and attack vectors. Think MS ad

    • Next we are going to tell you how disable you cars seatbelt beeper because it is more fun to drive without protection.

      Go to a junk yard, find an old car, cut out the clip portion of the seat belt and insert into your seat buckle. No more harassment. It's your car, you do with it what you want so long as you're not endangering those around you.

      Or the best place to hide your key because it is mor fun to not have to carry keys.

      Wut? That doesn't even make any sense. The only ones not carrying keys nowadays

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Fire up old Linux distros from before Firefox went multiprocess and you’ll see a separate process with a separate SELinux context, all natively sandboxed as best as an NPAPI plugin can be. Same thing happened with Java before the web plugin for that got dumped too.
  • Somebody alerted me about Ruffle in the last Flash story and it seems really cool. It's a web assembly emulator written in Rust and utilising a canvas element that emulates the Flash player. It seems like there is a way to go for Flash apps to be supported in a safe manner if only for niche / legacy actions. Maybe Adobe could help in some way, e.g. if its by donating cash or some of their existing testing suites or source.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by alexo ( 9335 )

      Ruffle has some issues which I hope they solve.

      For some reason it breaks the login of a banking site.

      And it has problems with CORS,

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DrXym ( 126579 )
        I doubt you'll ever see 100% emulation because Flash implemented its own communication protocols. As for CORS, that's an entire kettle of fish in its own right. It's hard enough to get that crap working even in its own right but I imagine Ruffle or some other emulator would have to do the necessary preflight stuff through JS in a manner similar to whatever Flash did.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by alexo ( 9335 )

          I doubt you'll ever see 100% emulation because Flash implemented its own communication protocols.

          I sincerely doubt that my bank uses Flash. The login page works perfectly well when Ruffle is disabled (and Flash is blocked) and fails when it is enabled.
          Breaking sites that don't use Flash is not a good sign.

          As for CORS, that's an entire kettle of fish in its own right. It's hard enough to get that crap working even in its own right but I imagine Ruffle or some other emulator would have to do the necessary preflight stuff through JS in a manner similar to whatever Flash did.

          Add-ons (at least on FF) can manipulate request and response headers. Ruffle could add the necessary CORS headers.

  • I remember about 10-12 years ago the BBC pages for kids (Cbebees, CBBC) had some very good educational games. For example Alphablocks was an interactive game that taught kids to read.
    Now with Flash discontinued those games are no longer available.
    This is unfortunate as those games had a lot of educational value.

    • Well, now all the kids that used those games to learn how to read can use those skills to try to re-write the games using HTML.

  • I mean, nowadays all browsers run active content and show videos, so what was the advantage getting rid of Flash again? Yes, it was used for a lot of annoying purposes and, yes, it was full of security flaws. But the same is now true for browsers.

    You could disable Flash (or simply not install it, if you were using Windows before 8) and get rid of the problem.But you can't surf the web without a browser.

    • It doesn't matter that current browsers have other ways to do active content/videos today. As obnoxious as flash was, there is content of a historic value out there that companies don't care to recreate, authors don't care to recreate, companies have gone out of business or authors have passed away, and all that content is just going to go poof with the flash kill switch. With adobe killing off flash, they really should be required to open the entire specification so the open source community can create a 1

  • Even though Steve was right, it's sad that nobody's come out with an authoring environment as good as Flash's. I mean, you could literally know nothing and put together stuff in flash, for good or ill.

  • I hope not. I don't want to die...

  • What better thing has replaced Flash? It truly was easy for creators to make something fun, and sometimes useful, despite the code base being a big insecure mess.

    What is used today? Are there some good features of Flash that haven't been replaced? Or sort of? It was clearly a niche and an industry, where have the players gone from here, and how do current things compare? I'd love to hear from an expert or developer on this matter.

    • What better thing has replaced Flash?... What is used today? Are there some good features of Flash that haven't been replaced? Or sort of? It was clearly a niche and an industry, where have the players gone from here, and how do current things compare?

      Honestly, nothing. Like, full disclosure, I hated flash. It's messy, it's ugly, it's insecure. But, a lot of people did a lot of cool things with it and it's not right for adobe to kill it off like that. It should be preserved.
      But to answer your question. Nothing. Like yeah, HTML 5 has canvas draws and stuff, but nothing comes close to what flash can do. The next closes thing is web assembly, but that's going to have it's own security problems, let alone performance issues or being a huge resource hog. An

    • One that hasn't been fully replaced is the ability to deliver good looking animation in very little bandwidth. Flash did it by passing vector graphics and movement info, leaving the rasterization to be done by the player. Now we have to send that stuff as video content instead, using ten times the bandwidth to deliver something that doesn't look as good. Vector graphics rendered locally adapt to any screen resolution and have no JPEG or MPEG artifacts.

      A lot of cartoons have been or are currently being made

  • Is making a third party flash player even legal? I mean, I definitely think it *should* be legal, but is it? Doesn't Adobe patents on flash and also the specification such that it makes it impossible to make a player without infringing (sort of like mp3 players, and 5G LTE or WiFi devices had to pay a license fee)?

    Also, they should make the flash players from JavaScript having to download and install a player/plug-in is really stupid.

    • Is making a third party flash player even legal?

      Let's hope so. Otherwise the authors of gnash [gnu.org] are in some trouble.

  • Still no good alternative for vector animation (Score:3)

    by jensend ( 71114 ) on Sunday January 03, 2021 @02:48PM (#60891362)

    The stuff Flash was enabling in the days of Macromedia and Homestar Runner and AtomFilms was great. Then Adobe tried to turn it into a full "rich media platform" and it became a monster.

    We still don't have any good replacement for .swf for the one thing Flash was good at. SVG animation is a nightmare and all the alternatives are just as bad. Many people have resorted to encoding their vector animations as raster H.264, simultaneously looking worse than a vector animation would while taking literally a hundred times the bitrate.

  • If the entire app or game is contained in a single swf file then you only need that file and the player.

    Direct link to Adobe Flash Player projector aka standalone:
    https://fpdownload.macromedia.... [macromedia.com]

    Parent site which has that download:
    https://www.adobe.com/support/... [adobe.com]

    • Considering the vast amount of security vulnerabilities that have been discovered lurking in the flash player (most recent security fix was a few months ago) I wouldn't install that on any machine that is used for anything other than playing flash games. Basically a burner computer in its own segregated subnet.

      • The standalone projector isn't a browser or a plugin. It is an interpreter. You must give the standalone projector a swf file. The Flash browser plugin is something different and it is dangerous because your browser can be exploited by any random site you visit or an advertisement on that site.

        For an analogy, replace flashplayer_32_sa.exe with python.exe. Replace foo_game.swf with foo_game.py. Running foo_game.py with python.exe is about the same as running foo_game.swf with flashplayer_32_sa.exe. The game,

  • What about Zombo.Com? (Score:3)

    by sandbagger ( 654585 ) on Sunday January 03, 2021 @03:38PM (#60891536)

    This must be preserved.

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