Kind of confused why people would try to run/compile/etc. Flash games on modern platforms.
If this game were a native app from that era, you'd think nothing of whipping out a Windows XP VM and installing an era-appropriate toolchain in it.
And really, the same applies not only for native executables, but to any proprietary / non-standards-based format from a previous era that's since been left to the wayside. Want to use a website that embeds a Java applet? You'd better (effectively) time-travel to 2005.
IMHO, at this point, a Flash game (for which the source code is not available) should really be "modernized" similarly to the way the Internet Archive makes old Windows and Mac software available — by wrapping them up into their own little standalone VM images. Like this: https://archive.org/details/chips_challenge_windows_3.x
Beyond ... everything, sometimes people just want a thing to work. A thing that previously worked, and ... supposedly, was kind of a solved problem with stuff like Pepper.
I understand that big surface areas are a thing, but there's just loads of content that exists as Flash and is fine.
An extra layer here, Flash CS3 Professional is better as a quick iterating game tool than basically everything out there for people nowadays (Game Maker Studio is up there but still...). I think that making _new_ content in Flash is justifiable except for the whole "can't get it to run anywhere" issue.
> I understand that big surface areas are a thing, but there's just loads of content that exists as Flash and is fine.
Well, yeah; and there's loads of Win95 games that run fine under WINE. But if you want to guarantee that an arbitrary Win95 game will work, without knowing anything about it (as is the case with a content-blind bulk archivist like the Internet Archive), then you'd better wrap it in a real Win95 VM, rather than assuming it's one of the easy cases.
In the case of SWF files, though, it's not that the files themselves have heavy/weird requirements; it's that their abstract machine / runtime itself makes some extremely dated assumptions about a wide-ranging set of platform APIs.
It's a bit like how RPG Maker 95 games are hard to run on Windows 10. To run arbitrary games, you could in theory "just" make a 100%-coverage reimplementation of the RPG Maker 95 runtime, build it for Windows 10, and it would run just fine. But as it stands, the only 100%-coverage implementation of said runtime is RPG Maker 95 itself; and so the only good way to run RM95 games, is in a Windows 9x VM, where all the particular APIs RM95 is looking for exist.
> An extra layer here, Flash CS3 Professional is better as a quick iterating game tool than basically everything out there for people nowadays
You know that Adobe Animate (nee Flash Professional) still exists, right? And that you can still make games in it, not just animations? It just exports to HTML5 now, rather than to SWF.
Yes, because Windows still exists and has a team that cares about backward compatibility. Adobe Flash does not still exist. (Adobe Animate does, yes, but the SWF export format, no.)
Also, even living software calls its compatibility somewhere. Windows programs from 1995 do not work on modern systems. Mostly because many of them still had 16-bit components at that point (e.g. a 16-bit installer), and 64-bit Windows doesn't run 16-bit executables.
It does not have to be 16 bit. A lot of 32 bit programs I wrote in Virtual Basic 5 or 6 does not work properly in Windows 7 or later. This is not for a lack of runtime files, but the program will either exit early with cryptic error messages or have extremely glitchy UI that makes them unusable.
> If this game were a native app from that era, you'd think nothing of whipping out a Windows XP VM and installing an era-appropriate toolchain in it.
I mean sure, or I could just run whatever it is on my current computer? I know Visual Basic 6 was still, for example, able to be run on at least Windows 7. (I haven't tried it on Windows 10.)
It's the same reason Nintendo makes money reselling games from 5-10 years ago - there was nothing wrong with the software (from a standalone, I want to play this game or this movie, perspective).
Yeah sure you can dig through lots of specialized software and hardware to do software museum "curation", if you will, but this isn't a case of emulatimg DOS games or what not - those work.
The sucessor to flash's animation software, well it doesn't exist, not even with all html's fancy css and js frameworks. And I say that knowing there is some impressive stuff done in JS.
It's a bit like if we all decided, nope, C++ is illegal now, gotta do everything in rust, except now decades of work just can't be compiled anymore...
I can still go out and compile old c programs on really old operating systems even on modern systems - these are working programs which simply no longer function, and the replacement efforts have no major steam behind them.
Arguably for good reason, the old stuff did really suck and HTML was better for a bit (it sucks again already), but these are perfectly good pieces of art that just no longer function.
If this game were a native app from that era, you'd think nothing of whipping out a Windows XP VM and installing an era-appropriate toolchain in it.
And really, the same applies not only for native executables, but to any proprietary / non-standards-based format from a previous era that's since been left to the wayside. Want to use a website that embeds a Java applet? You'd better (effectively) time-travel to 2005.
IMHO, at this point, a Flash game (for which the source code is not available) should really be "modernized" similarly to the way the Internet Archive makes old Windows and Mac software available — by wrapping them up into their own little standalone VM images. Like this: https://archive.org/details/chips_challenge_windows_3.x