Standalone Flash Players: How to Play Flash Games in Future
Posted: Fri Oct 11, 2019 8:28 pm
Since the age of Flash is officially coming towards its end, with Adobe and many browser makers planning to drop all support for Flash in future, people are going to find they need a way to play their favourite Flash games. Fortunately there exist standalone players that can still give you access to your favourite Flash content.
How Do I Use Them?
Standalone Flash players are applications installed onto your computer, so to play games from the forums you will need to download the game's SWF file to your computer, which you can do using the file name beneath any embedded game. Once downloaded, double-clicking the SWF file should launch your standalone player automatically, otherwise you will need to open it and then locate the game's file.
Standalone Players
The following is a quick, and by no means up-to-date, list of standalone Flash players. If you know of others, feel free to send me a PM or reply to this thread with suggestions, and I can update the list.
Saved Game Data
For most Flash games all save data is identified by the location from which it was played, meaning all games you play directly on this site are stored in a folder for LegendOfKrystal.com. This means that when you download the game and play it in a standalone player the save data will not be found, as the game is being played from a new location.
For most games it will be easiest to just start again, making sure that you save the game file somewhere permanent (i.e- don't move it, otherwise your saves will be "lost" again). If you absolutely need to recover save game data, you can find it in one of the locations listed here. To recover an old save, first run the game offline and create a new save; in the local storage folder(s), find this new save, and then find the old save for the game, move the old save to where the new save was created, it should now be possible to load it.
How Do I Use Them?
Standalone Flash players are applications installed onto your computer, so to play games from the forums you will need to download the game's SWF file to your computer, which you can do using the file name beneath any embedded game. Once downloaded, double-clicking the SWF file should launch your standalone player automatically, otherwise you will need to open it and then locate the game's file.
Standalone Players
The following is a quick, and by no means up-to-date, list of standalone Flash players. If you know of others, feel free to send me a PM or reply to this thread with suggestions, and I can update the list.
- Newgrounds Player: Window only standalone player from Newgrounds, who have a pretty big stake in keeping Flash accessible since they've got 20+ years of Flash content on the site.
- Elmedia Player: Seems to be macOS only but the performance is much better than Flash Projector and it plays older files as well. This is what I'm currently using.
Flash Player Beta: Scroll down the linked page for standalone players for Mac and Windows. While these are listed as betas, they are the current versions, and the page should be kept up to date at least until Flash is discontinued.(these seem to have been taken down)Flash Projector by Adobe: For Linux, Mac and Windows. These are technically for debugging, so they're a bit more demanding in terms of performance, but this has never been a problem for me. The downloads you want are for the Flash Projector, not the browser plugins (these plugins shouldn't be installed for a non-development system). These are the same apps that are currently packaged with Adobe Animate.(no longer available)
Saved Game Data
For most Flash games all save data is identified by the location from which it was played, meaning all games you play directly on this site are stored in a folder for LegendOfKrystal.com. This means that when you download the game and play it in a standalone player the save data will not be found, as the game is being played from a new location.
For most games it will be easiest to just start again, making sure that you save the game file somewhere permanent (i.e- don't move it, otherwise your saves will be "lost" again). If you absolutely need to recover save game data, you can find it in one of the locations listed here. To recover an old save, first run the game offline and create a new save; in the local storage folder(s), find this new save, and then find the old save for the game, move the old save to where the new save was created, it should now be possible to load it.