!Flash

Updated 31 may 2001

Introduction

!Flash is a plugin for WWW browsers that enables you to view Flash files. Many commercial sites use this format to make their site more attractive. Besides showing nice pictures and clips the Flash object also allows you to navigate through a site, therefore, without the right plugin it was most times impossible to get past the "Get Shockwave" logo while running a WWW browser. Although we now have the capability to view flash files not all sites will allow us to enter because they test for other required features or do not detect the !Flash plugin.

Version

The latest version is 0.410.1.1 30 may 2001. Here is a changes list with all the major and minor changes made to !Flash.

Acknowledgement

The Flash file format is created by Macromedia® for distributing internet content. They also develop tools for creating flash objects.

The !Flash plugin is a port of the Flash Plugin for Linux which was developed by Olivier Debon and Fabrice Bellard. If you have any trouble with !Flash please do not contact them because they have nothing to do with !Flash.

Licence

!Flash is released under GNU General Public License. Check out the pages of the Free Software Foundation for a more detailed description about this license.

Resources

To use !Flash you need a lot of memory. In practice this means it will only run on a machine with RISC OS 3.5 or higher. For a simple Flash object you need around 2 Mb. You will also need the nested window manager (version 3.98 or higher). You can get the nested window manager from the following sources:

The Acorn user 200th issue cover CD, dir CDFS::AUCD4.$.Acorn.NewBoot
The Acorn RiscCafe CD
The Acorn Browse CD
The Oregano Support page. Go to the Boot structure updates. There are seperate updates for RISC OS 3.7 and 4!

See the readme files on how you should install/upgrade !Boot.

As of version 0.49c you will need at least RISC OS version 3.5. For users of older RISC OS systems the old version is still available.

!Flash has been reported to work on

SA RiscPC 48 Mb, RiscOs 4.02
SA RiscPC, RiscOs 3.7
A540 12 Mb, Riscos 3.1

If you have succeeded running !Flash on some other hardware please email me so I can extent the list.

Browser compatibillity

!Flash uses the Acorn plugin protocol. This means that any program that supports this protocol should be able to embed Flash objects. !Flash has been reported to work with.

browser	version	streaming
!Fresco	2.02	No
!Fresco	2.13	No
!Browse	2.07	Unknown
!Voyager	2.07	Unknown
!Oregano	1.04	No
!Oregano	1.10	Yes
!WebsterXL	1.95	Unknown

If your browser version supports streaming you can enable this by editing the Choises file inside !Flash. To edit this change the OFF in ON after Streaming.

Download

For owners of RISC OS 3.5 (or better) you can download the latest version !Flash version 0.410.1.1 30 may 2001

If you do not have RISC OS 3.5 (or better) you can still download the older version here.

Sources

If you want to build !Flash 0.410.1.1 yourself here are the Sources

To build !Flash you need to have the Acorn C++ compiler and the following libraries:

The standard Acorn libs (o.c++lib, :o.Stubs)
The OS lib 5.5 (o.OsLib)
PlayIt libraries

You also need !Amu to run the makefiles.