MiSTer FPGA Forum

I know this is probably an odd one to ask, but I was thinking back to some of the Shockwave and flash games/videos from the earlier days of the internet.

Then of course I then started wondering if a standalone core that could play all those old games/files would be possible. Most weren't very good, but there were definitely some gems along the way.

I'm guessing the larger issue would be the lack of preservation of those old files. Probably a chicken vs egg type issue.

I think this would fall outside of the wheelhouse of FPGA. There's not specific hardware per say that needs to be recreated in order to play Shockwave or Flash games since they ran on all kinds of computers. It's more of a software platform. It would be kind of like asking for someone to make a core for Steam (not quite but just to put it into a perspective).

For Flash and Shockwave, the software is far more significant than the hardware. I think this one is better suited to a regular software emulator solution.

Shockwave/Flash is so far abstracted from hardware this would not be a practical application for an FPGA.

Take a look at Lightspark, Gnash or my favourite Ruffle.

You'd have to construct a new machine that would, essentially, be able to run something like Windows XP Embedded + the player software. Quite likely you're looking at something at least in the Pentium II CPU territory with accelerated video decoding at a half-decent resolution, and that's probably beyond the DE10 Nano.

Yeah, Flash is definitely in the software realm. It's not so much a virtual machine as it is a language interpreter and vector graphics/animation renderer and movie player.

Funny that this thread appeared here just the day after I restarted playing a classic Flash game, Tangerine Tycoon (which happens to still be available online). I'm glad I held my OS update to keep things like that around. Some Flash games are really worth preserving.

Thanks AngelicLiver for those pointers, that gives me some hope!

teknomedic wrote: ↑Mon Jun 13, 2022 5:16 am I know this is probably an odd one to ask, but I was thinking back to some of the Shockwave and flash games/videos from the earlier days of the internet check this site.

Then of course I then started wondering if a standalone core that could play all those old games/files would be possible. Most weren't very good, but there were definitely some gems along the way.

I'm guessing the larger issue would be the lack of preservation of those old files. Probably a chicken vs egg type issue.

Yes. It's not a question of whether the game is good or bad. If it were, more than half of each console's library (with a few exceptions) would not be worth preserving.

Furthermore, what one person considers a trash game may be considered a good game by another, and vice versa. For example, I despise Assassin's Creed 2 because the parkor and other controls are terrible. In contrast, I'm not sure why the Alien Shooter and Zombie Shooter franchises have largely gone unnoticed (Alien Shooter 2: Conscription is the one game in both series I dislike). If we went by whether or not anyone remembers or cares about the game rules, AC2 would be thrown out the window