Ruffle emulator gives new life to your archived Flash Player games

After serving the web for almost 25 years, Adobe Flash finally met its demise last month. Adobe decommissioned it on the 1st of January, 2021, by blocking it from all kinds of browsers, and a few days later, all Flash Player content was also blocked. However, if you are one of those who have archived your old flash games, then we have just the thing for you.

Ruffle is an open source Flash Player emulator that can be used to relive the good old Flash game days. Since there is no official support for Flash anymore, the biggest concern with Ruffle is security. The tool tackles this issue by running natively on almost all modern operating systems as a standalone app. Additionally, it can also run on most browsers through the use of WebAssembly.

The emulator has been written in the Rust programming language with the ability to run all of your old school SWF games. Thanks to the programming language’s built-in memory protection feature, it is significantly safer. It can help in eliminating various memory bugs, for instance, buffer overruns, use-after-free, data race conditions, as well as pointer related bugs. According to the company’s website, “Leveraging the safety of the modern browser sandbox and the memory safety guarantees of Rust, we can confidently avoid all the security pitfalls that Flash had a reputation for. Ruffle puts Flash back on the web, where it belongs – including iOS and Android!”

Ruffle’s Web Demo

Ruffle can be used as a standalone desktop application or can be embedded in a website using web assembly. One can also use Ruffle through a browser extension allowing you to run Flash content via the web. This essentially means that you can revisit your collection of Flash games on almost any system running on Windows, Linux, macOS, and if you want, on Android. As of now, there isn’t a standalone app for Android, so the only way you can use it is by loading the browser extension into Firefox or a Chromium-based browser that supports extensions like Kiwi Browser. Chances are that it might not work very well, so your best option would be to run the app on a PC.

According to Bleeping Computer, the Ruffle standalone desktop application works quite seamlessly. Once you fire up the app, it asks you to load an SWF file. Select the file and you should be good to go. If you’re just looking to briefly relive your old-school flash gaming experience, then check out BlueMaxima’s Flashpoint webgame preservation project. Alternatively, you can ask your favorite Flash-based sites to incorporate Ruffle’s JavaScript code to re-enable all their content since Adobe shut Flash down.

The post Ruffle emulator gives new life to your archived Flash Player games appeared first on xda-developers.

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