Could Someone Test These Browsergames?


grobi

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There are three very good browsergames I'd like to see on my pandora. Could someone with a beagle-/devboard/realpandora test them?

Crayon-clone:
http://magic.pen.fizzlebot.com/

Auditorium:
http://www.playauditorium.com/

FlOw:
http://intihuatani.usc.edu/cloud/flowing/

And to keep this Topic lean and clean:
I know theres an issue with flash on ARM, so please don't tell me that this might not work.
And yes, I also know that "Humpty dumpty physics" or so is already in the Pappstore.

I'm only interested in the tricks my pandora needs to be taught to make these kind of games possible (if they are possible at all).

Regards,
Hauke
 
Grobi said:
I know theres an issue with flash on ARM, so please don't tell me that this might not work.
The "issue" is that Adobe's flash player is not open-source. The open-source alternatives are only capable of playing flash-based video (usually), and very primitive flash web pages. I won't tell you they might not work, because they definitely will not work.
 
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Grobi said:
I know theres an issue with flash on ARM, so please don't tell me that this might not work.
You know... there's an issue with flash on ARM... but you don't want people to tell you it won't work.
So you want people to lie? I can do that!
These all work flawlessly, despite the total lack of flash support!
 
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WizardStan said:
Grobi said:
I know theres an issue with flash on ARM, so please don't tell me that this might not work.
You know... there's an issue with flash on ARM... but you don't want people to tell you it won't work.
So you want people to lie? I can do that!
These all work flawlessly, despite the total lack of flash support!
LMAO

I think Grobi wants someone to tell him if there is another way to get these to work sense he knows there is no flash. I think Chip's answer should suffice.
 
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WizardStan said:
Grobi said:
I know theres an issue with flash on ARM, so please don't tell me that this might not work.
You know... there's an issue with flash on ARM... but you don't want people to tell you it won't work.
So you want people to lie? I can do that!
These all work flawlessly, despite the total lack of flash support!

No, I don't want people to lie but to tell me about workarounds like gash or something in that direction.

Adobe Flash is closed source, but there are flash replacements (crafted by reverse engineering?)
Regards,
Hauke
 
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Grobi said:
*snip*
Adobe Flash is closed source, but there are flash replacements (crafted by reverse engineering?)
Regards,
Hauke
And that's the problem. Reverse engineering can only go so far. That's one of the core issues open source addresses.

Maybe if there was some sort of specification... Apparently there is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#Specifications said:
In April 2006, the Flash SWF file format specification was released [...]. The file format specification document is offered only to developers who agree to a license agreement that permits them to use the specifications only to develop programs that can export to the Flash file format. The license forbids the use of the specifications to create programs that can be used for playback of Flash files. The Flash 9 specification was made available under similar restrictions.
There we go. Adobe has expressively forbidden the development of players compliant to their specifications. Nice!

At least they have removed said restrictions recently:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#Specifications said:
In June 2009, Adobe launched the Open Screen Project (Adobe link), which made the SWF specification available without restrictions. Previously, developers couldn't use the specification for making SWF-compatible players, but only for making SWF-exporting authoring software.

I don't know if 7~8 months have been enought for an open source full implementation to be developed. If not yet, at least there should be one sometime in the future. Hopefully Adobe will continue to release the specs for newer versions of Flash.
 
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There is hope that Abobe will officially port Flash 10 to Linux ARM based devices, and we can cram support into the Pandora (unofficially). Adobe seems hell-bent on getting flash on the iThingy, and Canonical (Ubuntu) is clawing at Adobe to make sure they bring it over to the upcoming Ubuntu ARM distro as well. While we might not have full Flash 10 out of the box, full flash support seems to be a distinct eventuality, and likely to appear before the end of 2010. Here's hoping anyway.
 
A smartbook with working Flash 10 was demoed on a Qualcomm event a few weeks ago, so it shouldn't take that long any more till it is released :)
 
The N900 runs Maemo linux, is on an OMAP3, and has full Flash. It might be possible to hack it out of that device and into the Pandora.
 
fischju2000 said:
The N900 runs Maemo linux, is on an OMAP3, and has full Flash. It might be possible to hack it out of that device and into the Pandora.

its an argument that has arisen many times. no one knows yet. i think flash games are on the lower half of the priority list.
i think if we can get the hacked flash off it'll be good. but surely breaking some sort of copyright law in re-distributing it
 
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Sphinxter said:
We, the web and the world would be better off if no one ever reads that spec. No game is worth extending adobes reign of terror.
Shortly after the spec was released, I remember someone from the Gnash project saying he'd read it and it was basically worthless. Even if someone followed the spec to the letter, it still wouldn't be 100% compatible with Adobe's flash. I may have misunderstood though.
 
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Yoyobuae said:
So they pulled a mini OOXML. >_>
Oh not at all. I believe Adobe genuinely wants people to use the spec to create players as it would help spread their influence. They were just incompetent at developing it.
Microsoft intentionally created OOXML in a way that only they could follow. The incompetence was in the committee that approved it.
 
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gnash isn't that bad, I remember that some games worked on it. And some didn't. For example the player character in "Shift 1/2/3" was running while being displayed upside down.

Pandora developers could install gnash or qflash or swfdec to default OS. (or did I miss some other flash implementation?)

And in fact I'm curious how dinorun works on Pandora (with gnash or another player). I'm too lazy now, but maybe someone will do a linux-flash comparison on various games and tell us how they work? That comparison could be done on x86, it's not that important right now to run them on ARM, after all when we have an OSS flash player we can port it.
 
mindlord said:
There is hope that Abobe will officially port Flash 10 to Linux ARM based devices, and we can cram support into the Pandora (unofficially). Adobe seems hell-bent on getting flash on the iThingy, and Canonical (Ubuntu) is clawing at Adobe to make sure they bring it over to the upcoming Ubuntu ARM distro as well. While we might not have full Flash 10 out of the box, full flash support seems to be a distinct eventuality, and likely to appear before the end of 2010. Here's hoping anyway.
Shouldn't be a ready ARM Flash end of 2009? We have end of 2009 but I don't see any Official ARM Flash Players. Adobe seems to have roblems with their own Software. ^_^
I wonder. A x86 Flash Plugin has less than 2MB. How many lines of code can this include? It shouldn't be that complex piece of Software (in theory).
 
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fusion_power said:
mindlord said:
There is hope that Abobe will officially port Flash 10 to Linux ARM based devices, and we can cram support into the Pandora (unofficially). Adobe seems hell-bent on getting flash on the iThingy, and Canonical (Ubuntu) is clawing at Adobe to make sure they bring it over to the upcoming Ubuntu ARM distro as well. While we might not have full Flash 10 out of the box, full flash support seems to be a distinct eventuality, and likely to appear before the end of 2010. Here's hoping anyway.
Shouldn't be a ready ARM Flash end of 2009? We have end of 2009 but I don't see any Official ARM Flash Players. Adobe seems to have roblems with their own Software. ^_^
I wonder. A x86 Flash Plugin has less than 2MB. How many lines of code can this include? It shouldn't be that complex piece of Software (in theory).
The size of the binary doesn't have a direct relationship with the amount of code. If anything the binary is much more compact.
 
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A 2Mb binary? Like, say, twice the size of the main Steam executable, or the average size of a complete SNES game, or the size of the main Python DLL, or Windows ntoskrnl.exe (each of which probably contain hundreds of thousands of lines of code, if not millions, are usually compressed and rely on lots of extra code to be present, e.g. BIOS, firmware, graphics processors, extraneous libraries, Windows internal functions, etc.)?

Reverse-engineering any of those to a usable degree is a seriously complicated task, especially if you are then hoping to recreate them on an entirely different architecture that doesn't have the same supporting hardware/software. It took *years* for someone to disassemble and reverse engineer the old DOS game Transport Tycoon, to the point where some vaguely readable / compilable C code could be made that produced a working executable, which then formed the initial basis of the OpenTTD project that's available for all platforms. YEARS.

And that was a silly DOS game that was entirely self-contained (and I know from experience that most DOS games were actually quite "tightly" programmed and it was easy to follow the code paths with a simple debugger - today's debugging is much harder and today's programming languages throw an awful lot of junk in there for you to decipher), was being reversed to some code that could produce a working executable on the *same* OS / architecture, and it barely produced something that worked. And in the end most of the code was just scrapped and rewritten piece by piece because it was so hard to understand what it actually did - they're now about 3/4 years down the line of the rewrite, let alone the initial disassembly. They've been doing that project since 2002 and it wasn't until about 2006/7 that it actually became good enough to be ported and rival the original in terms of compatibility and stability, and they *still* haven't managed to replace all the original artwork and sounds with their own non-copyrighted versions.

The flash plugin probably uses a million and one internal Windows libraries to do its job (HTTP fetching, encryption, file / network access, etc.) all of which would have to be understood and recreated on another platform perfectly if anything is going to work.

I hate how people misunderstand the complexity of "reverse-engineering" and, from there, porting... it's like giving someone a 747 and then saying "Go on, build me a factory to make another one identical in every detail" (yeah, not just a replica 747 but a way to produce *every* component it had), even though nobody makes the parts, nobody has any of the plans or blueprints, nobody remembers how it went together, and you have to use a different material for every piece because the original materials are no longer available.

In 5-10 years, Gnash will be able to comfortably handle today's Flash perfectly. In 5-10 years, Wine will be able to comfortably handle the majority of today's Windows applications perfectly (a simple game like Castle of the Winds still has bugs in Wine and that was written using only Windows 3.0 functions!). In 5-10 years, nobody will care. Such is the problem behind getting people to work on such projects.
 
The other problem with reverse-engineering is that, if memory serves, people who have installed the Flash plugin are not allowed to work on Gnash because of their agreement with Adobe. So they only have 5 or 6 actual developers, and everyone else has to sit outside, testing. Supposedly.
 
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