Flash not Dead
In the previous blog post, “Homepage Animations”, I did a brief review of the life and death of the Flash player. In one of the articles on Flash, I found mention of the Ruffle Flash emulator. I didn’t pursue the lead at the time but returned to it recently to find out more about it.
Resurrecting old Flash sites is as simple as including a script tag:
<script src="https://unpkg.com/@ruffle-rs/ruffle"></script>
By adding this script, I was able to get bb1 site to render again. Unfortunately, Actionscript 3 isn’t supported yet, but they are working on it. Since the bb2 site is written in Actionscript 3, it does not render yet.
The Ruffle emulator is written in Rust and executes in browsers through the Web Assembly (WASM) API. The emulator isn’t feature complete so there are likely some gaps and unexpected behaviors while it continues to mature.