Want to be able to use those old Shockwave Flash files again ?
As we all know all browsers are dropping support for Flash due to its security risks. This can be an issue if you have a large collection of shockwave flash (SWF) games, or even something more useful lying about.
If you do have such files lying about they are not totally useless, as long as the SWF files are the old AV1 format (AV2 [actionscript 3] became available in 2006 and mandatory to use around 2013 so more recent files will not run yet).
Enter Ruffle (https://ruffle.rs/), a Flash Player emulator written in Rust and made available as webassembly and javascript for all modern browsers with webassembly support. This allows those old flash files to run in a sandboxed environment.
It provides, it order of what I find important
- a web server can be configured to provide applicationtype wasm (some servers support it by default, apache must have it explicitly configured) and adding a single one line ‘script’ entry to any webpage is enough to allow the webserver to display working flash content to users without the users needing to install anything on their client machines/browsers to view the flash content
- a browser extension to allow flash content to run on the client browser, for those sites that do not publish ruffle from the server webpage, so old flash sites will work for you again (although by now you will have probably un-bookmarked the old sites that were unusable for you until now)
- a standalone command line client to play SWF files from your desktop
Ruffle is still in development. It does not have all the features of AV1 implemented and work on AV2 compatibility while begun is not likely to be available for quite some time; as Ruffle is of course being developed entirely by volunteers. As such it produces nightly builds so you will probably want to check regularly and get updates periodically. It is under active development as can be seen from the reported issues although most issues seem to relate to specific swf files.
In the list above order of importance for me is of course based on the fact I run a web server so wish to be able to server content without visiting browsers needing to have extensions installed. Having said thatI did have to trawl through old backups to find any flash files to test this with as I had cleaned them all off my server when flash support was dropped from browsers (grin). But find some I did, along with the old html that used to show them, and yes adding that one script line does make most of them availble to browsers again.
The standalone client for linux works well also.
I have not tried the browser extention as my webserver now serves the files in a usable way.
This is a very interesting project, so if you have any skills in Rust or javascript jump in and help.
For those running webservers that have old archives SWF content, you may want to look at Ruffle and un-archive any useful or fun files again.
It should be notes that I have not been able to get SWF files such as FlowPlayer and flvplayer to work under ruffle in order to play ‘FLV’ files rather than swf ones; but I still have to try exotic combinations such as trying to provide CAB files so it may not be impossible; and as mentioned Ruffle is still under development so they may just magically (after a lot of work by the volunteer developers) become usable at some point.
