Reviving Flash (AS2) with Ruffle

In February of 2020 I started the cleanup and revival of an old website (read more about that in Joy, visit please-transfer.us) and all the way at the end of December I did a lot more cleaning up still. I removed old dead links, added some new treasures and cleaned up more old code.

What: I had come across an article on archive.org about reviving old Flash animations and games (AS2) with ruffle.rs and the process seemed simple and easy enough to be very tempting. I couldn’t resist.

How: It was in fact very easy:

  1. I downloaded the zip with the standalone version of ruffle.
  2. Unzipped it and uploaded the files to the root of the website
  3. Added AddType application/wasm .wasm on its own line in the .htaccess file
  4. Linked the ruffle.js in the footer of any webpage that has Flash files embedded

Et voilà, with a little Rust and JavaScript help, it all works again!

Thoughts: The only thing that stopped working for me was Flash scrollbars, buttons and simple animations etc all worked well, but this is of course by no means an exhaustive testing of Ruffle, just a mini-Flash revival on one of my sites.

I will definitely be using ruffle again and am a little blue that it’s not yet working very well with AS3, but hopefully in the future!

2 thoughts on “Reviving Flash (AS2) with Ruffle”

  1. Your article is exactly what I was looking for!
    I have major problems ding that and I dont know what I am doing wrong.
    It really seems as easy as 123 but I still suck at it ^^

    downloaded the zip, extracted the files and uploaded it on my websites directory.
    put “AddType application/wasm .wasm” on its own line in the .htaccess file
    put “” on the same website with the swf file

    Reply

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