Ruffle the Flash feathers!

The End of the World!

So it’s the END OF THE WORLD, and sadly that means that all the old media of the 1st gen ‘rich’ web experence is all gone with the long end of Adobe flash. At one point Flash was not only ubiquitious but all sponsored a C/C++ compiler but that stuff sadly won’t work.

So yeah, sad. However, check out ruffle! Naturally it’s a chromium extension, but everything is chrome now so it’ll work fine. It plays many of the early flash type stuff with little to no issues!

Currently Ruffle only supports games written in ActionScript 1 and 2. This includes all games before 2006 and only some games released later.

Currently Ruffle only supports games written in ActionScript 1 and 2. This includes all games before 2006 and only some games released later.

Unfortunately, your content was using Actionscript 3, which Ruffle does not yet support.

From the FAQ

It’s hard to think it’s been over 20 years since the whole ‘eStudio‘ thing, but it’s cute to keep it going. Although we are at the point where you can run Windows 2000 in javascript so there is that brute force path…

So sure it’s not perfect but what is? Kitty Cat Dance, Dancing Colin, Maiyahi, it’s a MAD WORLD!!

Flash on!

VIDEO Capture USB 2.0 Video Adapter with Audio

Capture and deit High – quality Video and audio!

So I wanted to capture some composite PAL signals, and well yeah I have a fancy capture card but it’s only HDMI of all things. NO VGA, EGA/CGA and sure no composite. So I headed down to Sun CHeong Computer Co. Ltd. 246 Apliu Street Shum Shai Po, and picked up one of these.

The bundled software, honestech VHS to DVD 3.0, is pure garbage. Basically it always sets for NTSC and never works. The program to change the input style does nothing either. terrible. But the honestech TVR 2.5 (37MB download!) however does work.

As a plus it lets you set PAL or NTSC

Although it’s not all that great, I have a webcam, and toggling between the display inputs can trigger a bluescreen.

So yeah it’s not so great.

I can’t really comment on the quality of the capture as it turns out I don’t have any RCA cables, so this is me running a jumper wire to the device directly. This is FAR from ideal but here we go:

So yeah…. It’s probably me, but there you go. at $99 HKD ($13 USD?) it’s not great. Actually its damned near temperamental. But its better than nothing.

Otherwise, MEH.

The arrogance of Silicon Valley is astounding: or the death of 6to4

For many people across the world, and I suspect the majority the deathmarch rollout of IPv6 has been about as obtainable today as it was in the early 00’s. Absolutely no traction from ISP’s. Where I live in Hong Kong, none of the residential or even commercial connections I have access to have native v6. Instead there was this fantastic option of tunneling IPv6 into IPv4, using a technology called 6to4 which gave everyone with a registered IPv4 address suddenly had 65535 networks to build out their own massive IPv6 deployment.

Simply put 6to4 put the individual onto the map for a NAT’less IPv6 world. 6to4 allowed two IPv6 hosts to talk to each other through the IPv6 Internet backbone, with zero changes on the Internet required. It just worked.

And of course Silicon Valley knows best, and decided that this network democratization must be stopped. Power to the People is the anthesis of the megacorps.

Google DNS Primary: 2001:4860:4860::8888
Google DNS Secondary: 2001:4860:4860::8844
Cloudflare DNS Primary: 2606:4700:4700::1111
Cloudflare DNS Secondary: 2606:4700:4700::1001
Quad9 DNS Primary: 2620:fe::fe
Quad9 DNS Secondary: 2620:fe::fe:9

This is a list of some popular ‘common’ IPv6 DNS servers. Windows 10/11 (probably 8/8.1 but who uses that?!) are not only IPv6 capable but actually IPv6 native, with a preference for the IPv6 DNS servers.

TP-Link Wireless N Router WR840N choices

I have this low end TP-Link Wireless N Router WR840N router, as where I live the maximum speed is 30Mbit/10Mbit DSL. There was no point in buying anything crazy expensive. My ISP has zero IPv6 deployment. The only way I can participate is buying a tunnel, or using 6to4. So I’d been using 6to4 for a while, and things have been great. But the last while it’s been super downhill. Sadly the firmware doesn’t give an option to force IPv6 DNS, but it automatically chooses Google.

C:\Users\neozeed>ping 2001:4860:4860::8888

Pinging 2001:4860:4860::8888 with 32 bytes of data:
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.

Ping statistics for 2001:4860:4860::8888:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),

And sure enough I’m getting massive timeouts, and the web had basically become utterly unusable. Fantastic.

I’d even gone through the steps of creating a local DNS server and having it VPN to the United States thinking that’d help me, as the DNS errors felt like the encroaching Great Firewall of China. However the source of all my problems just turned out to be out of touch Silicon Valley arrogance.

rfc7526 (ietf.org) Deprecating the Anycast Prefix for 6to4 Relay Routers

This is where they chose to kill over IPv6 for the masses, because local firewalls work as expected.

Authors' Addresses

   Ole Troan
   Cisco
   Oslo
   Norway

   EMail: [email protected]

Yeah what a surprise. And of course Google cut off IPv6. These tech giant oligarchs are not your friends.

The good news is that the other ISP’s Cloudflare & Cloud9 still honor 6to4.

Configuring IPv6 DNS on Windows 11

Windows 11 supports DNS over HTTPS, so you just need to enable it. I’m hardwired so under the settings -> network then -> Ethernet for me, maybe Wi-Fi for you?

Then just hit Edit over the DNS server assignment:

Then go ahead and pick a NON GOOGLE DNS service, and select DNS over HTTPS for the ‘ultra secure’ wave of the future.

And now your DNS will work. YAY.

C:\Users\jason>nslookup
Default Server:  one.one.one.one
Address:  2606:4700:4700::1111

> google.com
Server:  one.one.one.one
Address:  2606:4700:4700::1111

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:    google.com
Addresses:  2404:6800:4001:800::200e
          172.217.174.174

Of course you won’t be able to connect to anything from Google over IPv6, but that is the price you pay for not living in the precious Silicon Valley tech bubble.

Personally I think it’s a good thing when elitists lock themselves away from the world, and decrease their relevancy to everyone.

Obviously the end game won’t be some magical rollout of IPv6 over Asia, rather it’ll be the end of IPv6. As always the problems stemmed from the backbone, even the 512MB limit of the cisco 7200 was overcome, but NAT got around the limitations of the fixed and exhausted IPv4 network. Too bad they had to kill it, but of course it’s just because random people could just host stuff on their own network, and well network democratization isn’t what cisco et all is all about.

Nothing

I’m not sure why but I seem to be getting pulled into the ZX spectrum. Maybe it’s because I’ve yet to have seen one, and find it interesting about this massive parallel space I knew nothing of.

I’d found this review of the game, by sinc LAIR, which goes over a bit of history behind this port of the game. Very cool stuff, but for non русский speakers like me, be sure to turn on the auto translated subtitles!

The game is for sale for a mere €3 zxonline.net. One thing I had issues with, is because it’s Russian, normal Pay Pal blocks the transaction of account to account, so you have to use incognito mode, and tell Pay Pal to process it as credit card and it’ll work fine. Keeping in mind since Pay Pal does the CC charge, your # never goes to Russia. And it’s a damned shame, it’s not like ever Russian hacker is all about online crimes, some just want to make cool games.

Game play is challenging as hell! It’s very much a ‘one touch and you are dead’ game. I cheated and uses save states from the EmuZWin emulator.

ABSOLUTELY GET A JOYSTICK!

I don’t know why I was playing with the keyboard, holy crap don’t do that, don’t waste your time!

Would I recommend nothing for the ZX Spectrum 128k? Absolutely. It’s totally worth the €3, you can feel the love in this game!

sinc LAIR is going to have a live stream of it in a few hours, so I can see how to get past the spinning monster thing on level 2. Maybe I’ll post some video of me constantly dying.