BlueMaxima's Flashpoint is a Flash game and animation preservation project that allows for the usage of more than 100,000 rich web applications that are no longer possible to play online after all major browsers removed native support for NPAPI-enabled plugins, most notably

Adobe Flash Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a multimedia software platform used for production of animations, rich web applications, desktop applications, mobile apps, mobile games, and embedded web browser video players. Fla ...

. The project was initiated by Australian Ben Latimore in 2018, initially as part of a separate project called Archive Team. The project has developed a launcher for playing the archived games and animations, which when including all games and media takes up about 1.42

terabyte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...

s. It works by simulating the Internet, "tricking" the files into thinking that they are being played on the original site, so they can be loaded and experienced. While named after and mostly focused on Flash content, media using other discontinued web plugins are also preserved, such as

Shockwave In physics, a shock wave (also spelled shockwave), or shock, is a type of propagating disturbance that moves faster than the local speed of sound in the medium. Like an ordinary wave, a shock wave carries energy and can propagate through a me ...

Silverlight Microsoft Silverlight is a discontinued application framework designed for writing and running rich web applications, similar to Adobe's runtime, Adobe Flash. A plugin for Silverlight is still available for a very small number of browsers. Wh ...

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...

, Unity Web Player and many others, as well as deprecated software frameworks such as

ActiveX ActiveX is a deprecated software framework created by Microsoft that adapts its earlier Component Object Model (COM) and Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) technologies for content downloaded from a network, particularly from the World Wide Web. ...

. The site currently lists 71 distinct web technologies as being preserved. The legality of the project has been described as "unclear" but creators who do not want their games included can ask for their removal. There are two main versions of Flashpoint: Ultimate and Infinity. Ultimate contains all games pre-downloaded, while Infinity downloads game files on-demand. There is also a Core version made for adding games into Flashpoint, which only contains a limited amount of games.

References

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External links

BlueMaxima's Flashpoint Official Website
Conservation and restoration of cultural heritage Web archiving initiatives Adobe Flash