Flash on Pale Moon on Valve Steam Deck not working Topic is solved

[gnomer]

Operating system: SteamOS 3.7.19 Build 2025.11.24.1
Browser version: 33.9.1
32-bit or 64-bit browser?: 64-bit
Problem URL: https://www.arcadeprehacks.com/game/27300/raze-3.html
Browser theme (if not default):
Installed add-ons:
Installed plugins: (about:plugins): libflashplayer.so

If possible, please include the output of help->troubleshooting information (as text):

Extremely niche problem.

I got my hands on a steam deck and encountered a road block.

I have Pale Moon installed in /home/deck/Apps/palemoon
I (hopefully) followed the right steps to extract CleanFlash 34.0.0.137. (using ‘sudo cp -r usr/* /usr/‘ I found that lib64 is symlinked to lib. I “fixed”(?) it by just deleting the lib64 in cleanflash.)
libflashplayer.so appears in /home/deck/.mozilla/plugins/ so I think I’m on the right track?

However when I try play a game, it does ask to allow flash to run. When I do allow it, nothing works. Just blank.

**PASTE troubleshooting information here**

[Mæstro]

This is not a general problem affecting Linux users of Pale Moon 34·0·1. The Flash game loads as expected for me in Debian 10, using the same Clean Flash plug-in as you tried to install. I suspect you have installed it incorrectly. I never needed to deal with symlinking when I installed it.

In any case, it is nice to see ArcadePreHacks still alive and well and using traditional embedded SWF files.

[UCyborg]

What output do you get with this command in terminal?

Code: Select all

cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep VDPAU

Does it show the name of VDPAU driver? If so, try launching Pale Moon like so from its folder:

Code: Select all

VDPAU_DRIVER=driver_name ./palemoon

Substituting driver_name for whatever driver was reported from the previous command.

This is not a general problem affecting Linux users of Pale Moon 34·0·1. The Flash game loads as expected for me in Debian 10, using the same Clean Flash plug-in as you tried to install.

I don't believe you. I've yet to see Flash work normally on Linux, especially out of box. Broken OpenGL rendering, broken video decoding (hence that env var fixing the issue in some cases, though I don't know how to test it since YouTube's Flash video player is gone and I don't know any other that would make use of Flash's hardware video decoding), broken sound without going out and finding and compiling suitable libflashsupport.so to have it work normally through PipeWire / PulseAudio.

[Night Wing]

Just about every linux distribution that I know of have completely abandoned the Adobe Flash plugin following its official end-of-life on December 31, 2020. And I'm "guessing" so did SteamOS.
.

[Mæstro]

I don't believe you. I've yet to see Flash work normally on Linux, especially out of box. Broken OpenGL rendering, broken video decoding (hence that env var fixing the issue in some cases, though I don't know how to test it since YouTube's Flash video player is gone and I don't know any other that would make use of Flash's hardware video decoding), broken sound without going out and finding and compiling suitable libflashsupport.so to have it work normally through PipeWire / PulseAudio.

Seeing is believing. Sound also works properly, but that is harder for me to capture; I hope you can take it on trust now. I have heard that younger versions of Glibc (>2·35?) cause Flash to fail on Linux systems with Nvidia graphics cards, but that is as far as I have heard incompatibilities go. I installed it years ago, but I think I just used the terminal command on the Github, which put everything where it was meant to go. It really has worked out of the box for me, for I would not be able to reconfigure it on my own if needed.

[UCyborg]

Sound being delayed on Flash for one reason or another has been a known issue for decades, eg. one of the oldest posts about it. If you don't know, it uses ALSA directly and that usually doesn't work right with sound servers, at least with PulseAudio / PipeWire. Of course, if you only ever experienced delayed audio, you might believe it's the norm.

The old article mentions OSS support being in Adobe's version of flashsupport library of the era. Later, Lennart Poettering wrote his version to support his then new PulseAudio.

Many years later, audio is still delayed on current distros employing PipeWire unless suitable libflashsupport library is installed. Most recent effort I'm aware of is this one.

I've seen issues with Flash's hardware acceleration on two very different systems. Probably the only reason you don't hear about them is obscurity at this point. For some reason, it's even sensitive to the hackery discussed on this very forum in the past to get it running on y8.com instead of Ruffle, which somehow breaks it if it has hardware acceleration enabled in a way it simply doesn't appear in its container. But works fine on the same site on Windows.

[Mæstro]

I am aware of Linux’s traditional struggle with Flash playback by other means. I migrated from Windows 7 to Linux the same month Adobe abolished Flash support outside China, so I was concerned at the time with ensuring that my Flash files, many of which are from my childhood, remained playable free from defects. Luckily, everything played the same before and after switching to Linux. Indeed, everything worked smoothly out of the box; my engineer uncle was rather astonished to hear how smoothly it had gone when I told him. Perhaps it is relevant, as far as Flash is concerned, that I have always disabled hardware acceleration, both in Windows and Linux.

[UCyborg]

The problem is disabling hardware acceleration through conventional means requires Flash to not crash before you even get to its context menu.

[Mæstro]

Flash has never crashed on me, in Linux or otherwise. I disabled its hardware acceleration the normal way years ago, after installing it in Linux, without anything odd happening. When I say Flash has always just worked for me in Linux, I mean it. My choice to disable acceleration is one I make in general, for reasons expressed elsewhere and irrelevant to our subject. It was not motivated by instability in Flash, which again, I have never personally observed despite having been a regular Linux Flash user for five years now. Other Linux users here have also reported from time to time that they have been running Flash without difficulty.

[UCyborg]

Does your system have VDPAU drivers installed? mesa-vdpau-drivers, libvdpau1, any of those packages installed? These are standard on full featured distros these days. If your system doesn't have them, it's not exactly fair to compare to systems that do.

Debian is more of a server distro IMO and servers are rather boring, complexity wise.

[Mæstro]

Yes, mesa-vdpau-drivers:i386 (version 18·3·6·2+deb10u1), libvdpau1 and libvdpau1:i386 (both 1·1·1-10) are installed.

I find it a bit odd that you are so baffled when I report what is, to me and presumably others, the mundane fact that the latest version of Flash for Linux runs well on a mainstream, contemporary Linux distro.

[UCyborg]

Linux makes everything difficult.

Guess Linux goes out of its way to not work for me then. On my desktop, even without HW accel, there are rendering artifacts in Flash. And being considerably less smooth than on Windows.

Off-topic:
Another thing on that KUbuntu 21.10 install, I log out 2 times and 3rd time I don't get to the desktop anymore. Simply nothing renders, mostly blackness and part of the window of KeePass I have set to autostart is visible. The only thing I can really do is CTRL + ALT + F2 and reboot the damned thing from the terminal. Some day, I have to ditch that installation...

[Mæstro]

I know it can be frustrating. Linux compatibility is often a roll of the dice, and I admit I have been lucky as a sow in my personal experience. My less fortunate cases have been documented on this board, and such cases can literally drive me mad. My point is that enough people have casually mentioned, like I did in my original post here, that Flash is running well enough on their Linux systems to justify my original statement, that OP’s glitch is not due to some inherent conflict between the plug-in and OS. Things can work right. Maybe his system conflicts with Flash, and Glibc, hardware or something else is to blame. Maybe Flash was improperly installed. Unless he tells us, we can only speculate or suggest promising places to investigate, which could help us provide a real diagnosis. Let us both recall for whom this thread exists.

[Moonchild]

I know it can be frustrating. Linux compatibility is often a roll of the dice, and I admit I have been lucky as a sow in my personal experience.

There's a reason I chose to include Lyceus' quote in my sig

[gnomer]

This is not a general problem affecting Linux users of Pale Moon 34·0·1. The Flash game loads as expected for me in Debian 10, using the same Clean Flash plug-in as you tried to install. I suspect you have installed it incorrectly. I never needed to deal with symlinking when I installed it.

In any case, it is nice to see ArcadePreHacks still alive and well and using traditional embedded SWF files.

Steam OS automatically symlinks lib64 to lib. I think it’s to save storage out the box? I don’t know if that’s a linux thing, arch thing, or a Valve thing. Also haven’t touched Linux besides an attempt at a home server. So I blindly attempted to install it.

Recently thought about my childhood, so I decided to revisit ArcadePreHacks. Nice to know it’s still up all these years.

[gnomer]

What output do you get with this command in terminal?

Code: Select all

cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep VDPAU

Does it show the name of VDPAU driver? If so, try launching Pale Moon like so from its folder:

Code: Select all

VDPAU_DRIVER=driver_name ./palemoon

Substituting driver_name for whatever driver was reported from the previous command.

This is not a general problem affecting Linux users of Pale Moon 34·0·1. The Flash game loads as expected for me in Debian 10, using the same Clean Flash plug-in as you tried to install.

I don't believe you. I've yet to see Flash work normally on Linux, especially out of box. Broken OpenGL rendering, broken video decoding (hence that env var fixing the issue in some cases, though I don't know how to test it since YouTube's Flash video player is gone and I don't know any other that would make use of Flash's hardware video decoding), broken sound without going out and finding and compiling suitable libflashsupport.so to have it work normally through PipeWire / PulseAudio.

First commands outputs

Code: Select all

 cat: /var/log/Xorg.0.log: No such file or directory

[UCyborg]

Not having SteamOS at hand, can't tell where else would this log file be, assuming you're using Xorg and not Wayland.

But if you have the same bug as me, it shouldn't even matter what you put in VDPAU_DRIVER variable. I can literally set it to "foobar" and it's enough to bypass the crash while non-present variable makes it crash. Things would probably go wrong for video playback in this case.

Some searching around, Steam Deck should be using "radeonsi" driver, so the most correct approach would be to use that.

[gnomer]

Not having SteamOS at hand, can't tell where else would this log file be, assuming you're using Xorg and not Wayland.

But if you have the same bug as me, it shouldn't even matter what you put in VDPAU_DRIVER variable. I can literally set it to "foobar" and it's enough to bypass the crash while non-present variable makes it crash. Things would probably go wrong for video playback in this case.

Some searching around, Steam Deck should be using "radeonsi" driver, so the most correct approach would be to use that.

ahhh here’s what sets my normie is brain from Harvard scientists. Using their enormous brains to stump my puny little excuse of intelligence.

Some research to understand what your trying to tell me. I found out that normal mode uses Wayland. (which I’m not trying to use). While the desktop uses X11.

Also researching what VDPAU is. I’m pretty sure the steam deck is VA-API, using AMD for the CPU and GPU, rather than the focused VDPAU from NVIDIA.

I’m not an expert and I could comepletely wrong on everything here.

[UCyborg]

I'm not that smart TBH, just know some tech jargon and not good at putting things to layman's terms.

I was confused by the log file I expected to be there. X11 and Wayland are just two different foundations to have graphical interface rather than being stuck in fullscreen terminal. I didn't use Wayland much, being a novel thing that didn't quite turn out as people expected, but that's for another topic. As far as I'm aware, you typically use one or another for duration of entire computing session. On some Linux distros, one or another can be selected on login screen.

VDPAU happens to be the oldest API on Unix-like systems for communicating video decoding tasks with the graphics card and while developed by NVIDIA, non-NVIDIA drivers can implement it. Flash Player probes it by default every time it starts up, where the issue may arise.

So, I basically tried to tell you to navigate to your Pale Moon folder with the terminal application:

Code: Select all

cd /path/to/palemoon/folder

And launch Pale Moon like so:

Code: Select all

VDPAU_DRIVER=radeonsi ./palemoon

Then see how Flash behaves.

[gnomer]

I'm not that smart TBH, just know some tech jargon and not good at putting things to layman's terms.

I was confused by the log file I expected to be there. X11 and Wayland are just two different foundations to have graphical interface rather than being stuck in fullscreen terminal. I didn't use Wayland much, being a novel thing that didn't quite turn out as people expected, but that's for another topic. As far as I'm aware, you typically use one or another for duration of entire computing session. On some Linux distros, one or another can be selected on login screen.

VDPAU happens to be the oldest API on Unix-like systems for communicating video decoding tasks with the graphics card and while developed by NVIDIA, non-NVIDIA drivers can implement it. Flash Player probes it by default every time it starts up, where the issue may arise.

So, I basically tried to tell you to navigate to your Pale Moon folder with the terminal application:

Code: Select all

cd /path/to/palemoon/folder

And launch Pale Moon like so:

Code: Select all

VDPAU_DRIVER=radeonsi ./palemoon

Then see how Flash behaves.

Well I’ll be damned

60629CFA-A985-46CE-AF3B-513458852133.png

Gameplay works fine. Audio as well

As you correctly assumed, adding anything after 'VDPAU_DRIVER=' just works. (fingers crossed) (Edit: Everything works AS LONG AS I don’t resize the window.

Can’t even believe it was that simple. Thought I’d need more dependencies and more headaches to figure out. UCyborg you might as well be a wizard. Thank you.