An open-source emulator called Ruffle is in the works that aims to allow Flash games on platforms like Newgrounds to remain playable after Adobe and web browsers officially end support for Flash in 2020.
It’s a promising project, and one that could potentially keep a good chunk of early Flash-based games and content from essentially vanishing from the web once Flash is put out to pasture next year.
Spotted by PC Gamer over the weekend, Ruffle is a Rust-based, open-source emulator that can be installed as a browser plugin to detect Flash embeds and swap the code for Ruffle. Its announcement came as part of a Newgrounds post on new features headed to the site, but the extension itself isn’t contained to just Newgrounds projects.
As the Newgrounds announcement notes, ideally that means “meaning you could visit any old website and the Flash will (eventually) just WORK,” even after more and more browsers continue to slowly walk back their support for Flash.
On the web game portal Newgrounds specifically, Flash embed code is being gradually swapped out with Ruffle to allow Flash games and animations to run as intended, even if players don’t have the Ruffle extension installed on their machine.