In 2004, I wrote an implementation of Tetris in ActionScript 2 using Flash MX. I had thought the source code lost until just a few months ago. Upon finding that source, I immediately uploaded it to Github. Not too long afterwards, I tried to upon the .fla in the most recent version of Flash, without any luck. I have several projects that are stuck like this.

Not too long after I found my missing code cache, I updated a different project, a nonogram implementation in ActionScript, so that it could be compiled solely with the command line ActionScript compiler, mxmlc.

The Tetris project was more difficult to update because there were several assets created and stored in the .fla file, including some graphics. I decided to remove the dependency on the .fla and create a pure ActionScript application.

Some of the first things I did were to remove the fla from the project, and rearrange the source code into a package. I created a Makefile to run the compilation command, and setup guard to watch the source files, and rebuild the project upon change detection.

In addition to creating a package for all the source files, I also had to create a class out of the code that originally ran as part of the root MovieClip’s actions. Luckily, I had saved this script externally, and not inside of the .fla. I wrapped this in a Game class, and began debugging.

It took almost an hour to get the code to compile. Most of the issues were related to the transition from the ActionScript 2 to ActionScript 3. Some of the issues I ran into included:

• MovieClip methods such as attachToMovieClip and createEmptyMovieClip were not available.
• Warnings for functions without explicit return types
• Use of “function(): Void” instead of “function(): void”
• Warnings about lack of explicit types with variables
• Changes to the scope of loop counter variables
• Absence of the Key global
• Changes to event binding

Once I had everything compiling, then I worked on run-time errors. These included:

• Changes to “this” resolution (mostly having to do with event binding)
• Weird issues with static variables
• Changes to property definitions, for example from ._visible to .visible
• Missing references referred to in Game.as (these were assets from the fla)

But part of this process was also getting familiar again with ActionScript. For example, I learned that an empty MovieClip has no width, even if you assign one explicitly.

Guard was incredibly helpful in resolving both the compile-time and run-time issues. I had the swf reloading every few seconds until I got the game loop working.

The end result is shown below, compared to the old swf. The game is now pure code, if somewhat uglier than it was. Mostly, I’m glad I can preserve some of my work without being locked in by a vendor. You can find the source on Github, and a video of the new app in operation on Youtube.