Standalone Flash Players: How to Play Flash Games in Future

[Renara]

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.

• 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.

[Luka2005]

I use something as far as i can tell called Flash player _SA.

I've used it for awhile now even before this news. i find it a little more convenient than having to use my web browser.

I have had no problems with it at all it even works with saves.

[Hugh mann]

@Luka2005, it sounds like the note about saves confused you; What Renara means is that if you play a game on this site *in your browser* the save data will not transfer to the standalone player.

[Renara]

I use something as far as i can tell called Flash player _SA.

I think this is the same as the Flashplayer Beta link I gave, i.e- it's the official Adobe StandAlone (SA) player, though you may have a slightly different version to the one I linked.

[Luka2005]

@Luka2005, it sounds like the note about saves confused you; What Renara means is that if you play a game on this site *in your browser* the save data will not transfer to the standalone player.

No i was going on a diffrent thing a possible question that might come up "Do Standalone players allow Flash cookie saves or etc?"

[humbird0]

The standalone Flash players don't even need to be installed to run them. They're completely self-contained EXE's. Just download and double-click. In linux, you'll need to set the "execute" flag to make the Flash player runnable.


- Downloads -
From adobe:
https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb ... sions.html

From me: (in case Adobe takes down their page)
AcrionScript 2 (http://www.humbird0.com/content/misc/fl ... _linux.zip)
ActionScript 2+3 (http://www.humbird0.com/content/misc/fl ... newest.zip)

I'm providing downloads directly in case Adobe takes down that page. The reason why I have two downloads is because old ActionScript 2 Flash games run faster in the old players, and most of the stuff on Legend of Krystal uses the old format. My downloads include the Windows, Mac, and Linux flash players.
And I tested all of them to make sure they work


- Compiling -
These stand-alone flash players can ALSO convert flash games into EXE's.



KEEP THE SWF FILES!
Don't throw away the original SWF files. There's no guarantee that computers in the future will still use x86 processors. Remember when Apple switched from Power PC to Intel? They emulated Power PC for a few years while developers released new versions of their stuff, and then DROPPED the format. And Microsoft is about to release an ARM Windows tablet that emulates x86. Keep your original files.



.

[humbird0]

For the past year or so, a guy called BlueMaxima has been coordinating a massive archival project to backup EVERY Flash game and Flash animation on the internet, and make them all easily run-able. It's called the FlashPoint project. They already have, like, a million games backed up and working. You can already download their program and play the games. And they don't care if they're adult games or not. They want to backup EVERYTHING. But Legend of Krystal is kind of underground and nobody can access our links unless they're logged in, so...
WE need to send our files to THEM!

I have already added all my adult flash games to their archive.

About Flashpoint



Flashpoint's Website
Flashpoint's Discord server (this is where you send games to them)


The games download and run when you click on them. But if you want, you can even download the entire 200GB archive and run everything offline.


.

[humbird0]

Archive.org
They are a massive (40+ Petabyte) online library that's been backing up the internet for over 20 years. (The Internet Wayback Machine) But they're also trying to backup ALL old software and source files. Again, they don't care whether it's an AOL CD, a SNES rom, or adult games. They want to back up everything now and let the future decide what it's worth. Among other things, every upload automatically gets a bittorrent file.

Their software division is run by this guy, Jason Scott, and he's pretty damn cool.
He's the one who inspired BlueMaxima to start the Flashpoint project.
And yes, Flashpoint also has a backup on archive.org... just in case.
Video about Archive.org



Just today, I uploaded ALL of my original source files and planning documents I have for my old Guardia Forest game


I should probably do the same thing with my Pokemon Hentai Game. They definitely have enough space to preserve the 9.4 GB of source files, videos, reference pictures, and documentation I've accumulated while working on it.


.

[humbird0]

Send your SWF files to Flashpoint
Send your source files to archive.org

[humbird0]

"Do Standalone players allow Flash cookie saves or etc?"

Yes they do. They aren't missing any of the features. But there is one catch:
The saved game Flash cookies are associated with the location of the SWF file on the hard drive, so if you move the swf file to another folder, it will not be able to access the previous saved game until you move it back. Also, if you run the game in a different folder that folder will have its own saved games associated with it.

This can be confusing to understand. The save is "associated" with the folder, but it's not actually stored inside of that folder. Flash just thinks each folder is a different website, and remembers which websites created which saves. I think this was probably designed to avoid leaking data between different websites by only allowing save-data to be accessed from the exact same place it was created.

[Renara]

nobody can access our links unless they're logged in, so...

Actually, you can follow links and play and download all public files as a guest, you only need to be logged in to post or upload your own files; if you had to login to play the games we'd have approximately eleventy billion members by now

[Zeus Kabob]

Thanks Renara for the info here. It's really important to understand how to play Flash games in this age of deprecated flash plugins. Personally I've always used the flash projector, as I've found it to have better performance than most flash plugins.

Humbird0, great advice about getting games uploaded to archival projects. The flash games available here will continue to be available as .swf files for use with a standalone flash player, so that should be no issue, but upload to a flash game archival project will only serve to provide better exposure for the flash games here. I think pushing for archival for all these projects is a great idea; I've always been incredibly proud of all of our creators from the smallest side-room in LoK 1.2 to MiM:PUT that was born on our forums, I'm amazed and humbled by the people who have continued to use our site to post creative and original content.

I can't even begin to list the number of amazing projects that were born here, and I pride myself on my memory. Trying to put a short list of the projects made here would disrespect all the amazing projects born here that my memory isn't great enough to contain. Thank you all for contributing and I hope you all continue producing and playing games creatively and collaboratively.

[musical74]

Just want to make sure I don't need to do anything, once websites start saying heck to flash. I have a fair amount of .SWF files, that when I click on them, open up automatically correctly. If they do that now, I don't NEED to do anything special? There's a few .SWF games that I'd love to keep on here...

(Blame lack of caffeine for this question)

[Renara]

Just want to make sure I don't need to do anything, once websites start saying heck to flash. I have a fair amount of .SWF files, that when I click on them, open up automatically correctly. If they do that now, I don't NEED to do anything special? There's a few .SWF games that I'd love to keep on here...

(Blame lack of caffeine for this question)

If you double-click a .swf on your computer (in Explorer/Finder) and it opens in a Flash player then you should be fine; if it opens in a web browser such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari etc. then you'll need to get a standalone player, as fewer and fewer of the major browsers support Flash anymore.

[humbird0]

nobody can access our links unless they're logged in, so...

Actually, you can follow links and play and download all public files as a guest, you only need to be logged in to post or upload your own files; if you had to login to play the games we'd have approximately eleventy billion members by now

Whoops, sorry about that assumption.
I'm so used to most sites being subscribe-only these days.

[humbird0]

So there's a current web browser called Pale Moon that has regular Flash support and is even compatible with old Firefox extensions like as my old InkBunny Downloader. It isn't an old browser. It's actively maintained and updated, so this is another option is you want to just... keep using Flash anyway. Their entire goal is to keep backwards compatibility alive for things like this.

[humbird0]

I doubt anybody is considering removing anything, but let's keep the SWF files online here so the archivers have a chance to grab the files in the future.

Besides, there's nothing wrong with us continuing to make "download-only" games.

And people with older or compatible browsers will still be able still view the games online the old-fashioned way.