wapm-cli VS ruffle

To actually compile this we can use a tool called WABT (WebAssembly Binary Toolkit). It's basically a mess that requires CMake and I couldn't get it to run on WSL and I wasn't going to install MinGW. Instead there's a nice tool called WAPM from Wasmer which works like npm for webassembly packages and since it's been compiled down to webassembly we can run it in any environment. In fact we don't even need to add configuration so long as wapm is installed. We can run wax wat2wasm -- wat/mat.wat -o wasm/mat.wasm. wax is like npx for npm. If you're wondering the command we give wax is defined by the wasmer/wabt package: https://wapm.io/wasmer/wabt. Also for some reason you can't prefix local paths with ./ so wax wat2wasm -- ./wat/mat.wat doesn't work which tool me a while to figure out. Anyway this provides a nice simple compile environment if you want to work on raw WAT files.

That's the main reason we should start using WebAssembly for distributing and using packages.

Shamless plug: Wasmer [1] and WAPM [2] could help a lot on this quest!

[1]: https://wasmer.io/

[2]: https://wapm.io/

There's WAPM

If it's buildable for the WebAssembly WASI target, consider also distributing it through WAPM.

I don't know if many people have heard of it, but there's actually a WebAssembly Package Manager. It's similar to crates.io, except you upload WebAssembly binaries written in any language instead of Rust source code!

You can see this paying off with wapm, which lets you download applications that would have normally required compilation for your environment and run them anywhere with a supported runtime, which is imo pretty neat.

One step closer to the day when I can put actix-web creations up on WAPM so "Just type wax my-cool-thing to try it out" can be one of the distribution options.

I've added limited support to run wapm.io directly from the Terminal. Examples of commands that work well are wapm cowsay {Text} and wapm uuid.

The memories…

I often wondered what would happen to those wonderful Orisinal mini games after Flash's death, without actually checking out the site. Would Ferry Halim find the time to port them to "HTML5"? Would they just… disappear forever?

It turns out that they know run in Ruffle[1], a Rust/WASM based Flash Player emulator I've never heard of (or forgotten about). The handful of them that I have tested work flawlessly.

[1] https://ruffle.rs/

shrug It finds its uses. It's just not that overstated.

sandspiel is quite popular and is built using WASM: https://sandspiel.club/

Google Earth - https://blog.chromium.org/2019/06/webassembly-brings-google-...

Ruffle (the "make Flash run safely" tool) - https://ruffle.rs/

Ableton's Learning Synths - https://learningsynths.ableton.com/

etc etc. It's just hard to tell when something is using WASM when it "just works" and is indistinguishable from optimized JavaScript

I was amazed that the site still runs, apparently still using the same engine.

But it seems that it was a flash site (of course), and archive.org seems to replace Flash Player with "Ruffle" [1]. Either that, or someone of Tobin's team replaced Flash with Ruffle >= 2019.

[1] https://ruffle.rs/

Out of curiosity a couple months ago I wondered if I could play my old Proximity flash game on Newgrounds from the browser within the Quest 3 VR headset, and it worked great!

That led me to do a little searching, and I discovered that originally the game didn't work in Ruffle, as I apparently did something with the play game button that wasn't normal. But someone put a fix in it back in 2020[1] in order to get my game working again. That was pretty neat. Felt kind of nice that people still cared enough about my old game to make sure it still works in an emulator.

Still working on a more in-depth sequel (using Monogame), and I'm way overdue to make a new web version of the original. Might knock that out once I get closer to getting the sequel out there.

[1]: https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/pull/1024

i believe it's using Ruffle[0] and that's already happened[1]

[0] https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle

This is all using a really cool Flash emulator called https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle