For historical reasons, many of the scanned pinball apron instruction
cards that you can find for download on the Web are in SWF
(Shockwave Flash) format.
For historical reasons, many of the scanned pinball apron instruction
cards that you can find for download on the Web are in SWF
(Shockwave Flash) format.
As of PinballY version 1.1 Beta 5, PinballY can display simple SWF files natively, without any plug-ins, using its own built-in renderer. There's no need to install Adobe Flash Player or any other third-party software.
In the past, PinballY relied upon the Adobe Flash Player plug-in to display SWF files. Adobe made Flash Player obsolete as of the start of 2021, and pushed out an update that disabled existing Flash Player installations, so PinballY can no longer use it for SWF file rendering.
In version 1.1 Beta 5, PinballY addressed the end of Flash Player by adding its own built-in SWF renderer. I felt it was important for PinballY to continue supporting SWF, since a large number of HyperPin Media Packs contain instruction cards prepared in the SWF format, and since it's relatively difficult to convert existing SWF to other image file formats. The built-in SWF renderer is designed to make that possible without relying on any third-party software.
If you installed Flash Player on your system in the past just for the sake of PinballY, you can now remove it. PinballY no longer uses it.
Adobe considers SWF to be a dead format, so why does PinballY support it? It's simply because many of the instruction cards available for download from the virtual pinball sites are in SWF format. It's convenient in PinballY to be able to use those existing SWF files directly, especially since it's not straightforward to convert them to other more modern formats.
You might wonder how all of these SWF instruction cards came to be in the first place. SWF is known primarily as an animation format, whereas the instruction cards are just static graphics (and pretty simple graphics at that). Why weren't they originally created as PNGs or JPEGs? There's actually a good reason: SWF supports vector graphics, whereas PNG and JPEG are purely raster (pixel) formats. Vector formats scale to any size without losing any fidelity, so SWF was chosen as a sort of future-proofing, on the expectation that people would want to display the cards at ever-larger pixel sizes as monitor resolution increased. Unfortunately, even though it was a great idea to use vector graphics, the particular choice of file format almost ended up defeating the whole purpose, since SWF files are nearly useless now that the whole format is dead. It hardly matters that you can zoom them to any size if you can't display them at all. On the other hand, while Adobe has the power to kill Flash Player, they can't erase the SWF format from existence. They probably wish they had a time machine so they could, but for now, that's beyond their powers. The SWF format is documented well enough that I was able to create a mini-renderer that can at least handle the limited subset of SWF needed to display most of the extant instruction cards. So maybe it wasn't such a bad idea to use SWF after all. (And I'm actually happy that PinballY is rid of Flash Player, because I never much liked that approach for displaying these files. The integrated mini-renderer is lighter on resources, fits into the rest of the program more cleanly, and eliminates an annoying installation dependency. I should have built one when first writing PinballY, but Flash Player was too expedient an option at the time.)
Just to be clear, PinballY doesn't require you to use SWF instruction cards! It's perfectly happy to use an ordinary image format like PNG and JPEG whenever an instruction card is displayed. The only reason we're talking about SWF is that it's still the format of choice for a large number of extant HyperPin Media Packs, so we wanted to let you use those without doing any conversions.