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Amazing that the whole thing lived in ~1.7mb of data.

Really crazy how little data went into stuff like that.




The famous original "Napster Bad" (1) from 2000 was around 2 and half minutes long and only 600 KB (!) (specifically: 606,555 bytes -- just checked).

http://www.fastswf.com/jDwfXOc

And as it's drawn with vector graphics (I guess?) it can be sharper than most of the videos of that that you can find today (or was it fixed? I don't remember -- at least it looked so sharp then!). Anyway, the following video on youtube is approximately the content of the 600 KB swf, but, of course, with unchangeable and limited pixel rendering -- and around 50 MB in highest resolution.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeKX2bNP7QM

Edit: Just found -- the special edition captured in the above video is ~ 700 KB swf (719,527 bytes):

http://gpatricka.net/assets/napsterbad.swf

There, having 100 KB more, one can also click to see the "deleted scene", play a small "game" or read the hate mail. And it does render across my full screen.

Edit 2: Tried ruffle. It can play that swf. Ruffle good. (But it seems that the lines are thicker and that the connections don't look the same)

1) https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/WebAnimation/NapsterB...


> as it's drawn with vector graphics (I guess?)

Yeah, Flash was fundamentally a vector format for much of its life. It started adding bitmaps after a while, I wanna say in the Flash 5 era? It's been a long time and I've deliberately put a lot of my time with Flash in the mental vault, as it was also mostly time working under John K.

Anyway. I spent a lot of time hand-optimizing autotraces of scans of ink drawings, and even more time moving them around in sync to dialogue. Flash was very much about sending compact vector representations over your 28.8kbaud modem connection and moving them around instead of sending anything like what we would call a video stream, until they added the FLV format and YouTube happened.


Thanks. I knew about Flash in general, I just haven't checked yes if the 600 KB swf looked good full screen -- yes it does, with real Flash player. With Ruffle, the lines are thicker.

I still don't know, how are we going to be able to watch the old content with the native Flash player, at least on our desktops? Depending on the new emulations can result in missing or differently presented content (like these thicker lines?).


I think Adobe Animate still comes with Windows and OSX executables for the Flash Projector. Drop a local copy of the SWF on there and enjoy.




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