I haven't gone through the games they have, but it makes sense to preserve ALL games for future generations. I'd even go so far as to offer games in an original variant; but also in modified variants, aka one being mostly focused on fixing bugs and doing modest upgrades (simplifying playability and SLIGHT improvements to the user interface), as well as slightly more aggressive upgrades, including UI, making them visually beautiful but retaining the spirit of the game. For instance, of all the simcities, the first one was IMO the best. The graphics lateron were much better of course, but playability wise I found the first one the most addictive; similar with colonization, first one was quite good. The last 3 releases had better graphics, but playability wise it felt like 100 steps back.
What I would love to see is that we retain old flash games too. HTML5 was promoted as "making flash obsolete", but they never fulfilled that promise. Many flash-games simply died and there was no replacement in HTML; similar with some java applet games. Or at the least I could not find a replacement (that's also a problem - with google search having become nearly useless, finding things is super-hard; and of course old websites tend to die, that is also a problem).
A shame that they require a special software download. Do we not have any web-based Flash renderers yet? Seems like WASM should be able to do anything.
I thought the same. But it is necessary for the vast majority of games. It is not just an emulator for the .swf (and other formats) content you need, you often need bespoke proxy servers and server emulators to bypass some of the old DRM.
Nice. Glad to see someone is doing this. Everyone on HN hates on things like Flash, but they were genuinely innovative technologies that showed the world what was possible online. And the content was unmatched. The Internet today can’t compare.
That's clearly not true. Is that a rhetoric expression? Because I just wrote about Flash games being great - and I wasn't the only one doing so either.
I haven't gone through the games they have, but it makes sense to preserve ALL games for future generations. I'd even go so far as to offer games in an original variant; but also in modified variants, aka one being mostly focused on fixing bugs and doing modest upgrades (simplifying playability and SLIGHT improvements to the user interface), as well as slightly more aggressive upgrades, including UI, making them visually beautiful but retaining the spirit of the game. For instance, of all the simcities, the first one was IMO the best. The graphics lateron were much better of course, but playability wise I found the first one the most addictive; similar with colonization, first one was quite good. The last 3 releases had better graphics, but playability wise it felt like 100 steps back.
What I would love to see is that we retain old flash games too. HTML5 was promoted as "making flash obsolete", but they never fulfilled that promise. Many flash-games simply died and there was no replacement in HTML; similar with some java applet games. Or at the least I could not find a replacement (that's also a problem - with google search having become nearly useless, finding things is super-hard; and of course old websites tend to die, that is also a problem).
Open source flash player emulator: https://ruffle.rs/
A shame that they require a special software download. Do we not have any web-based Flash renderers yet? Seems like WASM should be able to do anything.
I thought the same. But it is necessary for the vast majority of games. It is not just an emulator for the .swf (and other formats) content you need, you often need bespoke proxy servers and server emulators to bypass some of the old DRM.
There's ruffle: https://ruffle.rs/
iirc support is generally good, but some versions of flash/actionscript have issues (at least last time I checked).
A bit sad not to find the whole collection of Larry Carlson's animations in there (only a few games.) Also, need full archive of Joe Cartoon!
Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38850697
If you’re interested in legal torrenting but GNU/Linux images are too small for you, this is for you.
Wouldn’t this still be technically a copyright violation? It seems unlikely this is all public domain stuff.
Can't tell if they have the entirety of Homestar Runner preserved, but I'm very glad to see they have some of it.
Nice. Glad to see someone is doing this. Everyone on HN hates on things like Flash, but they were genuinely innovative technologies that showed the world what was possible online. And the content was unmatched. The Internet today can’t compare.
I hate html, wasm, css, javascript as much as flash when they're used to waste my battery, cpu and ram with pointless effects when I'm browsing.
Love them when they're either getting out of the way of my content or used to make a great game.
> Everyone on HN hates on things like Flash
That's clearly not true. Is that a rhetoric expression? Because I just wrote about Flash games being great - and I wasn't the only one doing so either.