Ruffle / Future of Flash games Online - Small Indie team determined to preserve the hundreds of thousands of treasured games made using flash

[Pyre]

Ruffle is a program designed to re-enable the online play of Flash based games. It's been sponsored heavily by Armour Games, NinjaKiwi, and even the New York Times.

https://ruffle.rs/#

They are releasing multiple versions for different operating systems and browsers. I'm technically inept so I haven't got it installed yet. Maybe you guys will have more luck.

I really hope they get this fully functioning. Flash left a lot of games to just die. Downright shameful.

 

[Meat Pickle]

I hope they will be able to support Actionscript 3 soon, some of my favorite flash games run this.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Leveraging the safety of the modern browser sandbox and the memory safety guarantees of Rust, we can confidently avoid all the security pitfalls that Flash had a reputation for.

So, does anyone believe this?

 

[MarvinTheParanoidAndroid]

I've tried running Flash with Ruffle and it's fucking janky. Try watching Madness Combat and observe as the audio stops near the beginning. Hopefully they can get their shit together and make it function fully, but I get the feeling all of the security flaws of playing an swf could be circumvented by just containing it in a sandbox like Komodo.

So, does anyone believe this?

Yes, security experts use virtual machines all the time to contain malicious content as they interact with it. Sometimes they use multiple layers of sandboxing to contain a possible breach.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Yes, security experts use virtual machines all the time to contain malicious content

Sure, but the original Flash plugins were sandboxed too on modern browsers, presumably in the same way that the Ruffle plugin is.

 

[MarvinTheParanoidAndroid]

Sure, but the original Flash plugins were sandboxed too on modern browsers, presumably in the same way that the Ruffle plugin is.

lol then what was the point of decommissioning it?

Also no, they weren't sandboxed. They loaded straight to the browser and you could locate it in your cache.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Also no, they weren't sandboxed.

Since when? Flash was sandboxed on Firefox and Chrome since 2012. (Firefox apparently let you disable this but I had no idea until just now)
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/adobe-flash-protected-mode-firefox
https://blog.chromium.org/2010/12/rolling-out-sandbox-for-adobe-flash.html
Internet Explorer doesn't seem to have done this, but if you use IE it's your own fault.

So in other words:

lol then what was the point of decommissioning it?

This is exactly the question. What was the point? If sandboxing is the magic bullet, why did Flash have to go? Is it that the sandboxing used for Flash specifically was too lenient? It does seem that they had some sort of custom implementations for it. But then why doesn't Ruffle need that same kind of over-permissive sandboxing to implement Flash functionality?

 

[MarvinTheParanoidAndroid]

This is exactly the question. What was the point? If sandboxing is the magic bullet, why did Flash have to go? Is it that the sandboxing used for Flash specifically was too lenient? It does seem that they had some sort of custom implementations for it. But then why doesn't Ruffle need that same kind of over-permissive sandboxing to implement Flash functionality?

Then I have no idea, probably just because Adobe didn't want to continue supporting it.

 

[Toolbox]

I thought Flashpoint was the software to already do this and it worked?

 

[Pickle Dick]

I thought Flashpoint was the software to already do this and it worked?

AFAIK, Flashpoint is an archive of all the Flash games that are known to man, while Ruffle is used to run Flash content on older websites (Web Archive is using it, if I remember correctly)

 

[ItsTheShitt]

I think there's going to be performance issues with Ruffle running in a browser

And with the native version of Ruffle, I wouldn't use it, since it probably lacks fingerprint resistance
For security and privacy purposes, it would be good if there was a patched version of LightSpark/Gnash/Ruffle with fingerprint resistance

 

[sasazuka]

Nanaca Crash, which I have been using as a barometer of how well Ruffle emulates Flash games, is now working near-flawlessly in Ruffle (still a minor alignment problem with the score and high scores next to the "M" but they're now in more or less the right spots, unlike the previous builds I tried).

I still can't play the Sega Genesis games at emulator.online although I could easily imagine that a Genesis game running in a Genesis/Mega Drive emulator within a Flash file is more complicated for Ruffle to handle than a simple browser game like Nanaca Crash that was built in Flash in the first place.

 

[Wonder Boy]

discovered this the other week, somehow ms edge had it downloaded automatically when i was trawling ng for nostalgic old comedy flash and games

i'm glad it exists as through some mysterious means even my copy of media player classic AND my decompiler had given up the ghost on running flash anymore and this is now literally the only way left to do so other than exe exports... how absolutely incredible that adobe offered up nothing in the way of a plugin or program for archivists and left it up to the FOSS community, which managed to pull through like usual where the retarded megacorps failed

 

[Xarpho]

I think HomestarRunner.com switched to Ruffle, which is great because the YouTube versions are low resolution in comparison.

 

[Mr. 0]

discovered this the other week, somehow ms edge had it downloaded automatically when i was trawling ng for nostalgic old comedy flash and games

That might have been the built-in version on Newgrounds, they're kind of defaulting to that right now because the NG Player they normally used was a version of Flash they licensed from Adobe, so when they borked all the players it went as well.

Also anything made with Actionscript 3.0 is still a ways off. Right now they're still ironing out the various kinks in the AS2 made games.

 

[ItsTheShitt]

how absolutely incredible that adobe offered up nothing in the way of a plugin or program for archivists and left it up to the FOSS community, which managed to pull through like usual where the retarded megacorps failed

There were projects like Gnash (fork of GameSWF, 2005-2020) and GameSWF (2004-2007) that had to rely off of reverse engineering the SWF files themselves or using someone else's specifications (aka discoveries)

Adobe/Macromedia released specifications of new SWF formats since 2004 but it was rejected because of the restrictive license that didn't allow it to be used for making alternative players

Adobe started relaxing their specification license in 2011/2012