There's quite a few flash games/etc. that will be lost to the ages.

Quite interesting if you think about it! A bit of an antithesis to the idea that what's on the web is preserved forever.

There is an emulation project trying to save as much as possible https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/

There's nothing to run Flash media outside a browser? Obviously that wouldn't help anything dependent on proprietary server functionality, but that's true of any software.

I went through this a few weeks ago and found a site that explains how to run Flash games standalone: https://www.howtogeek.com/438141/how-to-play-adobe-flash-swf...

Basically there is a program you can download from Adobe called Flash Player Projector Content Debugger, then you just point that at the .swf and go.

An open source emulator would be better in the long term, but for now this is easier than trying to find a browser that still supports Flash natively.

You really don't need a tutorial to use Flash Projector. :)

• Windows: https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/3...

• Mac: https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/3...

• Linux: https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/3...

Download the version for your platform and open the swf file you want to run. That's it.

Linux users can also use the community-packaged Flatpak: https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.adobe.Flash-Player-Proj... All other links come from https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads.ht...

There's actually a project just for that. It aims to archive every single flash games on the internet in a playable format outside of the web browser. It can even simulate situations where the flash game needs to access asset files from the original server. https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/

I think newgrounds (a big flash games/videos portal) is offering such a tool, but I didn't tried it, since flash was still working in the browser.

There is Flashpoint

https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/faq/

https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/datahub/Linux_Support

There's this: https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/

Looks like it got dropped from Ubuntu though.

There is, but it doesn't work very well or at all depending on your source flash file.

Isn't there some way to preserve them, kind of like what people did with DOS boxes?

I'm sure there will be, there are a few implementations/emulators out there. Gnash, Shumway, Lightspark, and Ruffle. Ruffle seems to be pretty promising, it's being worked on by Newgrounds people and it's written in Rust to target the desktop and WASM. It looks like they can do animations and audio now, and they're working on the various versions of ActionScript.

Sadly Flash is incredibly hard to write a 100% implementation for. That's why there are so many attempts; they've all failed (but they can work well for specific Flash games/apps).

It would be great if Adobe could open source their existing Flash Player at some point.

I struggle to see how doing so would harm them commercially. Even if an open source player is available, browser vendors have no interest in supporting it, so it won't be supported with browsers. It isn't going to take away interest in their newer pure HTML5 authoring tools.

There are frameworks that let you compile flash games/apps/videos into native executables with pretty good compatibility (so minimal porting effort). That's probably the best we've got besides using an out-of-date insecure browser.

The adtech industry embraced flash in a big way, youtube was defaulting to the flash player until four years ago. Plus the dozens of flash ads and trackers that were (and still are) placed into many ad networks.

Now that the adtech firms switched to building the browser and the cluster of html5 technologies have matured it's easier to track people natively. That's really the only reason flash went away.

There was no Flash on the most popular smartphone (before Android took over). When ad tech went mobile they couldn't use Flash. So, ad tech shifted to web tech.

https://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/ had some fun little games written in flash.