Archiving Touhou Flash Animations & Games

[shockdude]

Interested in saving big parts of Touhou history? Flash is dying by the end of this year, and there are Touhou animations & games out there that ought to be saved.

Flash was a big factor in Touhou's rise in popularity. Cirno's Perfect Math Class and Marisa Stole the Precious Thing were both released as Flash animations, and the Walfas Create a Touhou Character is designed in Flash.

Flashpoint is a project for archiving old flash games & animations, allowing you to play them in a dedicated PC client separate from your web browser. Volunteers have curated & archived thousands of games & animations so far.
However, there is a severe lack of Touhou games & animations - only 3 games & 2 animations have been archived as of version 8.0.
As of Flashpoint 8.0, there are 46 Touhou games & 16 Touhou animations archived and playable. See image for the full list.

If you want to try these games & animations, just install Flashpoint (I recommend Flashpoint Infinity) then search for "tags:touhou".

Contributing to Flashpoint isn't hard. I submitted Walfas to Flashpoint because I knew how influential it was. But there's still a bunch of animations on the Walfas site, as well as IOSYS animations and multitudes of other games & animations which have yet to be archived.

[Lebon14]

I understand the cause. However, I'm not familiar with Touhou's early flash animation at all.

Btw, Flash itself just won't go "poof" like that. Adobe is just ending support which means that any holes in the plugin will just go unpatched forever.
What's cute about Internet and communities about Flash, is that they'll probably create a standalone Flash installer. You might need an older version of a browser but, at least, the option will still be there if you *really* need to watch a flash animation somewhere. I really hope that browsers comes up with a container of some sort to emulate Flash for compatibility sake.

[shockdude]

I understand the cause. However, I'm not familiar with Touhou's early flash animation at all.

Btw, Flash itself just won't go "poof" like that. Adobe is just ending support which means that any holes in the plugin will just go unpatched forever.
What's cute about Internet and communities about Flash, is that they'll probably create a standalone Flash installer. You might need an older version of a browser but, at least, the option will still be there if you *really* need to watch a flash animation somewhere. I really hope that browsers comes up with a container of some sort to emulate Flash for compatibility sake.

The "standalone Flash" is pretty much what Flashpoint is. It presents Flash animations & games in a dedicated Steam-like client, separate from normal web browsers (which are all gonna drop Flash support this year).
The issue is that only 5 Touhou animations & games have been added to Flashpoint. This thread is basically a call to help contribute more games & animations to Flashpoint, Touhou or otherwise.

[Lebon14]

The "standalone Flash" is pretty much what Flashpoint is. It presents Flash animations & games in a dedicated Steam-like client, separate from normal web browsers (which are all gonna drop Flash support this year).
The issue is that only 5 Touhou animations & games have been added to Flashpoint. This thread is basically a call to help contribute more games & animations to Flashpoint, Touhou or otherwise.

Like I said, Flash itself will not stop existing. Like Windows 7: a lot of tech website called, in early January 2020, "Windows 7's death". It still exists today and functional. I use it right now. It's just not supported and the same will be for Flash. You will always be able to use forks of Chromium and Firefox to load the plugin and see flash objects on an old website / sites that embed them. Or use older versions of Firefox or use Internet Explorer (LOL) to use Flash. Will it be recommanded? Of course, not. The option will still be there. However, of course, moving them to archival project that doesn't need to find a way to install Flash is the best case scenario.

[deice]

personally i don't see any difference between downloading flashpoint and just downloading adobe flash player and saving the SWF files you want off of the websites they are hosted on. if anything the latter is probably more space-efficient. i however do agree that a comprehensive list of touhou flash content should exist, so people who are looking for some don't have to search through itch, dagobah and other sites

[Branneg Xy]

 :D Thanks for the heads-up,inisght and constructive discussion  8)

personally i don't see any difference between downloading flashpoint and just downloading adobe flash player and saving the SWF files you want off of the websites they are hosted on. if anything the latter is probably more space-efficient. i however do agree that a comprehensive list of touhou flash content should exist, so people who are looking for some don't have to search through itch, dagobah and other site

https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/downloads/ indeed it is " Flashpoint 8.0 Ultimate
Very large file size (~330GB DL, ~400GB to extract)...Recommendedfor Archivists" and  " Flashpoint 8.0 Infinity
Smaller file size (1.7GB when extracted, filesize increases with amount of games played) ... Recommended for Casual Players ".
 
I have download and I am extracting+test launching the lighter one ( Flashpoint 8.0 Infinity) ; the space/storage-size/archive-size's efficiency incl. occasional slowdonws&bottenecks ,and in some cases or events the connection bandwith or sharing or networking, is a limiting and concerning aspect,though indirect and not direct, that should be taken in consideration and eventually improved,within its reasonable capacity since the aim and objective and nature and upload/download archive size  of Flashpoint.

[shockdude]

Like I said, Flash itself will not stop existing. Like Windows 7: a lot of tech website called, in early January 2020, "Windows 7's death". It still exists today and functional. I use it right now. It's just not supported and the same will be for Flash. You will always be able to use forks of Chromium and Firefox to load the plugin and see flash objects on an old website / sites that embed them. Or use older versions of Firefox or use Internet Explorer (LOL) to use Flash. Will it be recommanded? Of course, not. The option will still be there. However, of course, moving them to archival project that doesn't need to find a way to install Flash is the best case scenario.

I'm using "dead" as shorthand for "regular people shouldn't run this". Obviously you can keep "dead" software alive, but there's usually a good reason software should be "dead".
Sure, you can keep Flash alive with an old (insecure) web browser browsing old (possibly insecure) websites and running an old (insecure) web plugin. After 2020, no regular person should run this setup.

As for "archival project that doesn't need to find a way to install Flash is the best case scenario" Flashpoint is exactly that project lol. It includes an isolated Flash Player that doesn't need to be installed.
Ideally Flash would be fully emulated (e.g. Ruffle) so we don't need flash player at all, but we're a long way off from that.

personally i don't see any difference between downloading flashpoint and just downloading adobe flash player and saving the SWF files you want off of the websites they are hosted on. if anything the latter is probably more space-efficient. i however do agree that a comprehensive list of touhou flash content should exist, so people who are looking for some don't have to search through itch, dagobah and other sites

For most SWFs (and frankly most Touhou SWFs) you're right. But some flash games have "sitelocks", aka they refuse to run unless they're hosted on the website they were downloaded from. Other games depend on external files and resources from hardcoded locations. Flashpoint implements mechanisms to work around all of these issues, to meet the goal of preserving as many flash games & animations as possible.

To stay on topic: I found the original SWF for Cirno's Perfect Math Class on archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20090204020717if_/http://www.iosysos.com/mp3/IOSYS_toho9_SansuuKyoustrawberriessu.swf
Thinking of packaging it up myself for Flashpoint, though if someone else does it first that's ok too.

Edit: I submitted Cirno's Perfect Math Class, as well as Marisa Stole the Precious Thing. If all goes well, both should appear in the next Flashpoint release.

[Niektory]

Oh, looks interesting! I have a bit of a Touhou video archive and it includes some Flash animations and games as well. I'll upload them one of these days (and look for stuff I'm missing).

I remember Dagobah Flash Gallery also has a bunch of them. Which seems to be already archived by the BlueMaxima guys...?

There were previous attempts at open-source Flash players but they never managed to take off. Will that Ruffle thing be different? Time will tell. Would surely be nice.

[shockdude]

Turns out there are actually 46 Touhou games and 16 Touhou animations in Flashpoint, including many (not all) IOSYS animations.
I'm dumb and used the wrong search query. You have to search for "tags:touhou", and not just "touhou".


Original point of the thread still stands, since there's still many animations & games that are not yet archived.

[Hyouiibara]

Marisa Stole the Precious Thing

I listened for it a few days, and whenever I listed to doll's judgment:

"WHYWHYWHYWHYWHY DO I MISS YOU A LOT FOREVER??????"

[Goomba98]

Oh hey, I'm so glad you're doing this! I love that you are archiving create.swf first and foremost, but I'd love to see all the stuff on the Walfas site (including all the Touhou-related flash stuff and even the daily flashes), as well as all the Flash games SomeGuy712x's played, but I think those would be difficult to procure. (i've noticed some parts of the Walfas site are broken, like the post category feature and the "all Flash" subsection of the site, and some of the sources for the games SomeGuy played, whether on their original sites or on Dagobah, are 404'd.)

[Reimu6]

can someone just send me the link to play walfas? I can't download it (may or may not be on school chromebook cough COUGH) and i'm too lazy to thanks

[Kotоhime]

Someone on /jp/ has posted a Touhou Flash collection that's almost 500MB.
https://www.mediafire.com/file/utpsb6thb38xfpy/Misc_Touhou_Flash_Collection.7z/file
(if the link ever goes down, I'll upload it myself, but notify me of that if it happens).

can someone just send me the link to play walfas? I can't download it (may or may not be on school chromebook cough COUGH) and i'm too lazy to thanks

I don't think there's a viable option for playing Flash files on a Chromebook since it is just Chrome browser that has to be up to date, that said it likely has butchered any support for displaying Flash files.
https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle
Maybe this will work? It's a Flash emulator that runs in JavaScript I think. I have not tried it, but that may work for you.

[nAd]

A few months ago I played splatter faith for the first time and noticed there's no English translation to be found, so I decided I'd make one.
Can't imagine anyone getting much out of it considering it's 2022 but I figured it's better to have it somewhere than to just let it rot on my hard drive.

Link