Adobe Flash is dead - Embedded (offline) Flash games?

Libretro Cores
#1

I have several Flash games which until v.recently ran offline in Excel and PowerPoint but have now stopped working, presumably because Adobe has finally killed off Flash in the last few months. Windows update, in it’s infinite wisdom, seems to have gone ahead and uninstalled Flash for me when I updated to the latest build recently; I get that it would’ve been a security risk to keep it but it means that these games no longer work.

I found these two previous threads in the forums but as with every online search I run, they only seem to talk about browser-based, online flash content, whereas I’m wondering if there’s any way to get this offline stuff which used to work in the Office programs back up and running? Is there / would it maybe be possible to have a core for this kind of content?

Visual Basic for Applications is still installed on my machine and Excel Macros are still enabled for the content but the games just don’t run any more, presumably because Flash / Shockwave player is no more.

#2

Try here. https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash

#3

Not quite the offline option I was looking for but thanks for the link as it’s quite the treasure trove anyway and it did actually help me to get hold of the .swf of one particular game which I didn’t manage to convert using my own solution :+1:

I found a VBA script here with instructions for how to extract the Flash content from my existing Office files; refers to .doc and .xls only but the majority of mine were Excel files anyway and I found you can replace either term in the script with .pps (so may work with ppt, etc. as well?) and it seemed to work for PowerPoint also; it did about two thirds of my collection successfully, happily, all the good ones!

The resulting .swf files seem to work well in Ruffle.

Hope this helps someone!

1 Like
#4

Extracting Flash games from an Office file is the most bizarre thing I’ve ever heard in a pandemic. Lucky. PS: Archive you the option to download the .swf

#5

What, more bizarre than ‘setting fire to DANISH ZOMBIE MINK’??! :flushed: If that’s not a true story, it sounds like a flash game that needs to be made!

Extracting the content made sense as I didn’t even know how this stuff used to run in excel before I looked into it and I certainly didn’t know you could just download the swf from somewhere (which I mentioned I did for a couple of my games I couldn’t extract, thanks to your link). Some of the games are pretty playable for what they are (like Ultimate Flash Sonic, for example), so was sorry to have to let them go because Adobe was forcing you to do so…

Plus, you know, there’s the simple satisfaction of solving a problem you find annoying, so that was another plus!