Add Flash game support to RetroAchievements

[FIareon]

Now that 5 years have passed since Adobe Flash's End-of-Life, various preservation projects such as BlueMaxima's Flashpoint have popped up to archive a vast library of Flash games, spanning from the late 90s to 2020. I'm not too well versed in how a platform/console actually gets RetroAchievements support, but it feels like these games should be at least considered due to their cultural impact and age; and there are over 100,000! I will highlight some reasons as to why with these points:

1. There are simply many good Flash-exclusive games, that could be very nostalgic to a lot of people. Some good sets to match the games would give players an incentive to replay them more thoroughly. I'd sure fancy a Flash launch party featuring the most iconic Flash games...

2. They would bring a vast expansion to RetroAchievements' free selection of games.

Flash games have always been designed to be easy to pick up and play. This remains true today, as they are all easily browsable and installable with a few clicks through the aforementioned project. This ease of play would be enticing for some people, as they wouldn't have to deal with the fragmented sites, patches, and emulators most free games on RA currently employ or require. According to the "Meta - Freely Available in Forum Topic" hub, there are 850 free games with achievements on RA, which comprise only 8% of the game collection.

3. It would attract a different demographic, as well as expand the selection for the most prominent one.

RA is currently lacking representation for PC games, as the Standalone platform only has 6 sets for 2 games, and, from what I was able to gather, needed complex mods for every game to function. An Adobe Flash platform could significantly hasten the process, and appeal to people who played on their computers. Furthermore, when you consider how long Flash's lifespan was (up to 2020), not only would it benefit the older players that played them in the late 90s/2000s, but it could even introduce some younger users to RetroAchievements that might not have played the older consoles on the site.

4. Development seems not to be too complicated (at least, for my naive eyes)

Flash games can be played locally using the Adobe Flash Player, a program that can run .swf files, among others. It might be possible to modify this program to allow for RetroAchievements support.

The Flash games themselves seem to be easily dissectable, as they can be decompiled using a program called JPEXS Free Flash Decompiler. This might be useful to observe the game's code, and better understand the game's memory when you're writing code notes and achievement conditions. Again, I'm just a layman and haven't developed any sets, so I'm not sure how exactly development would work.

Perhaps there could be a direct partnership with Flashpoint, though that seems quite ambitious. But, seeing what this site has been able to accomplish before, it's certainly a possibility, and could get more eyes on the site.

A couple small thoughts:

How would Flash games be classified? Would they all be retail games? Homebrews? Hacks? Unlicensed?

Could Flash games taint the spirit of the site? As long as the implementation is executed well, I don't think it'll affect the site negatively.

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I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts on this. I'd personally love to play some classic Flash games with achievements, and explore the ones I haven't yet played. I commonly dive into random Flash game sessions, even without achievements, so I'd like to see this implemented one day. It's just such a different experience from the usual consoles. I hope I've provided some good reasons, but if not, feel free to chime in!

[DevRubicate]

Hello,
Flash is indeed very nostalgic to a lot of people and would fit in with RetroAchievements. I'm working on a project for adding achievements to Flash games, and already have the basics working locally. I haven't worked on it in a bit due to time constraints, but soon I'll be back in action. You can find my work here:

https://github.com/DevRubicate/RAFlash

I'd like to warn you though that your view that it would not be too complicated misses the mark though, because Flash is very fundamentally different from old retro games, it uses dynamic allocation of memory, which means that depending on the order things happen in, ingame memory will be in different places each time.

I'm trying to solve this by reading memory by other means than addresses, and have had a lot of success, but I'm not sure it's an approach that will work for all flash games.

[DevRubicate]

Hi again, progress has been great, we now have several working local test sets, and compatibility with AS2 games seems to be very good. AS3 games will still take some more work though.