When researching for conversion programs/emulators for flash last semester, we came up fairly dry. Even though there were a fair amount of projects within the realm of flash preservation, many were unmaintained, slow developing, or dead in the water. And so, we went forward with figuring out an alternative solution, manually converting with only the swf files. It grew to become a fairly daunting task, specifically because the best tool we had to recreate interactivity, Canvasser, does not support multiple pages (which many of the interactives contain). Also, many of the interactives were very extensive with the content within them, and would take a lot of time to reproduce.
Luckily, it seems that a semester later, a new project has arisen, produced by the team at Newgrounds.com, one of the largest maintainers of flash content today (games and animations). They have a strong incentive to keep everything running as if nothing ever happened to the eyes of the end user, and so good, usable progress on their project ruffle.rs is available. I’ve been able to test things, and while it’s not complete (which I assume it will be before flash dies this year), it can emulate the primitive scripting of the Hebrew interactives fairly well in this proof-of-concept phase.
They obviously look identical to the original flash file, and that’s because it essentially is running the flash file, but through WebAssembly, not flash player itself. I have a couple things to look into. First, I need to check compatibility with all interactives. Secondly, scaling is a small issue, where it’s not very clear how the size of the div aligns with the actual size of the flash file, and black bars are produced (a possible workaround is just to make the background black like I’ve done, which masks it). Lastly, there is an image with image caching, in which images load incorrectly most of the time with caching. I’ve tested this by disabling the cache in the developer tools, and the images fix. Luckily, though, it’s already been marked as an issue on the github, and I assume it will be fixed soon. .