Video of Flash on 2.70

I know that everyone wants flash on the psp. So its here. But no one is updating. So now, just to show you the flash functionality, I made a little video. Now people can know for sure whether or not they want to update. The video is full speed. The first flash movie played is Salad Fingers, stored on my Memory Stick. After a few seconds, I run the Sonic Blox swf to show you the gaming capabilities. The D-Pad does map to the keyboard arrow keys, in case you were wondering. The player supports full sound, full button support, and, in some cases, full speed flash. It seems to me that the size of the movie and sound quality affects the speed the movie is played at. If there is a sound set to "event" playing, the movie will play the sound at normal speed and play the movie at whatever speed it wants, not skipping any frames. If the sound is set to "stream" the sound will play at normal speed, and the movie will keep in sync with the sound, no matter how many frames it has to skip. I have also noticed that whether the flash is on the net or on the Memory Stick affects speed, too. If the movie is on the net, it will be much slower. If it is on the Memory Stick, it will play up to full speed. I got two movies (out of 3) to play at full speed on the Memory Stick: Salad Fingers and Crapwoman (not shown). Crapwoman was a bit slower on the net, but did not cause very much distraction. The things you want to avoid? Large (height and width-wise), high fps, frame-by-frame animation with good sound quality, like LittleFoot. I don't even WANT to see how that goes.

And if you are wondering why IndianCheese, of all people, would update to 2.70, I didn't. My friend Ernest did before I could stop him, so I borrowed his to experiment on.

Yeah man, being a Flash developer, Flash on the PSP is a huge attraction. It's just not enough. Unfortunately, Flash 6 is little more than glorified JavaScript... Any developer out there that thinks that they NEED version 6 Flash capabilities over JavaScript is probably either lazy or ignorant. The main selling point for Flash for me has been it's vector graphic handling capabilities, but we've already seen ample evidence that the PSP just doesn't have the resources to give modern vector graphics the presentation they deserve. It sounds like you had some good luck with the content you tried running, but I've also read a few posts that said that you get frequent "out of memory" messages with Flash content. Frankely, that's bad enough, makes it next to worthless to me (since I frequently work with complex, memory-intensive vector artwork), but to make the problem worse, it's not even the latest version of Flash. Flash 8 has fundamentally changed the way I work with Flash programs, and if you've spent any time in Flash developer forums, you'll see that a lot of developers share my opinion. Once you've developed for 8, you don't want to hobble yourself by pandering to older or "lite" versions. Not only is it much more inconvenient from a development standpoint, there's also a HUGE difference in capabilities. If they would've released a Flash 8 player, then you would have a platform that would be able to directly compete with LUA applications, meaning that a MASSIVE bulk of the existing homebrew games would be possible on 2.70. On top of that, if 6 is the best that can be accomplished on the PSP, then PSP users are going to miss out on another huge update to Flash's capabilities scheduled to come in the next few months that's going to make it even much more powerful.

Sorry for rambling, but from the sounds of it, this is just another very promising aspect of the PSP that Sony failed to fully realize, and it's very disappointing. System security is a very important core concept for the Flash development team (a factor which is widely attributed to the success of the medium), so it's almost certainly not going to compromize the PSP's security in any way, which means that it has very solid potential for solving a huge part of the homebrew problem, but it sounds like Sony's decision to cripple the PSP's 2D gaming possibilities has also fatally crippled any prospects of a fully realized Flash player as well. I'm just very, very disappointed.

What I've noticed is that when they say Flash 6, they mean it will play all Flash movies, but has no support for new functions in 7 or 8. My entire website is 7/8 Flash and all of the movies play just fine.

Another great option would be if Sony added a stand-alone Flash Player 6 to the games menu with FULL button mapping instead of just the arrow keys. Right now I am fine with playing Tetris, Breakout, mouse games, etc. but I hope Sony goes for it in the future.

And about that security issue...I have a FLA that I accidentally made that causes a fatal buffer overflow. I made it in Flash 7 way back when and it does the same thing to Flash 8. Flash closes immediately upon opening the file, even if there is unsaved work in another FLA that is open. If only there was a way to directly convert a FLA to a SWF, maybe we could overflow the PSP.

if you use flash mx 04, you can open the .fla file and convert it by going publish, which saves it as a .swf, i might see if there are any converters tho

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Originally Posted by IndianCheese

What I've noticed is that when they say Flash 6, they mean it will play all Flash movies, but has no support for new functions in 7 or 8. My entire website is 7/8 Flash and all of the movies play just fine.

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Yeah, this is no secret. It's the same for home computers. Heck, if you actually own Flash (and you should consider yourself lucky, I don't know many high school students that have that luxury...), you should know this since it's right in the documentation. Flash <i>really</i> hasn't changed that much over the last few years, and the changes that have been made were mostly work flow improvements and optimizations, so it really should come as no surprise that there's no strict player requirement for viewing files published for a certain player. That's why Flash 8 is so huge. For the first time in at least 5 years, they've given us a product that's offers significantly different functionality, and it's now very easy to build a Flash 8 file that won't run in previous versions (whereas until now, you could be about 80%, or better, sure that your project would be largely accessible to users with an older player). I recently had an interview, and the interviewer assured me that his computer had all of the latest software and plugins installed, but when he tried to view my latest Flash work, he couldn't access it and immediately implied that I had built buggy software. Boy, was his face red when he realized that he couldn't access it because he was still using Flash 7! So, yeah, real-world testament to the fact that there are significant differences in the latest version. Flash 9 is promising a completely new version of ActionScript that is promising a huge performance increase as well, so it's very likely that, without any hopes of a player update, PSP Flash users are going to be left even further behind in the dust within the next few months.

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Originally Posted by IndianCheese

And about that security issue...I have a FLA that I accidentally made that causes a fatal buffer overflow. I made it in Flash 7 way back when and it does the same thing to Flash 8. Flash closes immediately upon opening the file, even if there is unsaved work in another FLA that is open. If only there was a way to directly convert a FLA to a SWF, maybe we could overflow the PSP.

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Please note that unpredictable behaviour DOES NOT nessecarily constitute a security threat. As a matter of fact, the fact that Flash shuts down, as opposed to hanging, is a very good sign in terms of security. Also, take note of the fact that you are talking about the authoring software. Often times the stand alone and plugin versions don't behave the same way as the authoring version and don't get hung up on the same issues.

It's great that you're enthusiastic about pursuing exploits for the PSP, but you should study the issues involved a little bit more before making any declarations. For example, how exactly do you know that this Flash file that you accidentally created, causes a "fatal buffer overflow"?

Personally, while I really hope that the new and upcoming firmwares are cracked and blown as wide open as 1.00 and 1.50, I REALLY hope that people show some restraint and refrain from announcing any such discoveries until after the start of 2007. Let Sony get through this holiday season without knowing about the exploits, and that way we'll be guaranteed the ability to play some decent commercial games on the next homebrew-compatible version, if one's discovered before the year's over.

Even with that having been said, I highly doubt that the Flash module will provide an exploit. Like I said, the Flash team is very security conscious, and unless the PSP implementation is buggy or flawed, you're far more likely to discover an exploit through the web browser itself. So much more can go wrong with that that it's hard to cover all the bases. But, at the end of the day, the web browser still hasn't provided any hacks. Sony can afford some darn intelligent people, and you can bet that they've already thought of all of the obvious possibilities.

wOw, great iNfo hah. keEp up the gReAt wOrK!