Flash (swf) support soon?

[StickyChannel92]

I have been a fan with Flash games since I was a kid, especially CoolMathGames and Starfall. Nowadays, they became HTML5. I like Flash basically because there were so many games made and it gives me nostalgia when I play one.

The way I imagine SWF emulation with a controller it is the L-button for swapping keyboard and mouse; the D-pad controlling the arrow keys or mouse, or on-screen keyboard using a different keybind, and other buttons mapped to certain keys on the keyboard.

Now that I said that, I was wondering, will there ever be support for SWF Flash emulation in the future?

[Rezzy-dev]

It has been considered, but Flash is closed, proprietary technology and not easy to emulate on low-powered mobile devices (such as Miyoo devices). There has been a considerable effort to create an open source Flash player in the Gnash project, but its compatility/capabilities are still quite limited to my best knowledge.

In a word, I wouldn't count on it. Running Flash games on a Linux-powered mobile device is about as likely as running Windows games.

I share your love for the SWF culture, and miss it, too. You can play many Flash animations and games in the web browser, now, on the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash_games

That being said, the IA seems to be using Ruffle -- an SWF emulator I was not aware of:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruffle_(software)

It is a free and open source project, so, theoretically, it may be possible to port Ruffle to Miyoo if anyone is interested to give it a shot.

Ruffle is also limited in that it doesn't support ActionScript 3.0 yet -- so newer Flash software/games won't work with it.

The biggest challenge by far here is that most Flash games/software rely on quick use of the mouse, which doesn't translate well to a D-pad. The other big challenge is that emulating complex vector rendering on a 700 MHz ARM processor at decent speeds may prove quite tricky.

[Rezzy-dev]

Ruffle has a GitHub repository:

https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle

[Apaczer]

@Rezzy-dev, I was lucky to compile Gnash from gameblabla codebase, which is optimized version written in Cpp. Some games play fairly nice, but more complex one may struggle. Moreover we have now support for USB devices, so in theory you could use external mouse.

Hope you're fine,
Regards.

[szymor]

Well, I am quite interested how useful Gnash could be on MiyooCFW. Last week I tested gameblabla's port of Gnash for RetroFW on LDK Landscape. I run a few animations from IOSYS (available on dagobah.net) and performance leaves some room for improvements :) I also tried N game - it was unplayable.
I know RetroFW and MiyooCFW are not the same, but performance of the devices with these FWs is close to each other, so I do not expect much from MiyooCFW port.

[Apaczer]

sauce suggested to play with Flash Optimizer to optimize SWF itself by striping graphics of some detail etc., but so far I've been able only to reduce size of a file and cut loading times with it.

[Apaczer]

Yeah "N" is demanding AF on this player. Most of the stuff works horribly which I doubt can be overcomed with the 32MB DDR1 (still was worth it for the "Bowman"). Let me know if you find anything playable.