How do I make Windows Flash games work on Linux?
I have Windows educational flash games (legally purchased) that I would like my daughter to use OLPC on her .
I know some users could run them under Linux with wines, but this really is not an OLPC option as they need a CD-ROM to run and OLPC does not have a CD.
Games are installed from a CD and then run from an exe file. They need a CD to be on the disc during use.
I saw there are some flash decompilers out there, so I wondered if it is possible to decompile the game and then recompile it for Linux?
Update
After some further research and experimentation, I got a little closer to launching games.
It turns out the exe is a projector (created with Director) and all it does is run the dxr file in a subdirectory. I can open this file directly in Flash Player, but this is only the initial menu from which you can choose different actions.
The problem is that when you select an action, you receive the error "Unable to find file:" \ SUBDIR \ ACTIVITY ".
The action subdirs are on the same level as the menu subdirs. So I tried to make a dummy movie that just launches the menu, and launches it from the root directory (similar to the original projector). I just run the menu, but it still gives the same error for actions.
It probably depends on what you mean by "Windows Flash" game. Flash content usually exists as SWF, which is platform independent and can be played on any OS (in theory - the actual quality of Linux flash players was inconsistent). So if you can find SWF content in these games, just copy them wherever you want, you can do the trick.
However, if these games are usually run from CD, it might be more. If the CDs contain EXE game content, you can view the projector files. A projector is basically an EXE that combines Flash Player and SWF content for playback, providing you with an EXE of your content that you can run on a system without Flash installed. If that's what you have, then copying that EXE to the target system and running under wine might work. However, the projector may have some kind of logic to prevent it from starting other than the CD drive. I'm not sure what can be done about this. I believe there are tools that can extract SWF content from a projector, but I can't vouch for any of them. (This will probably also violate the license you bought the games for, for what it's worth.)
Finally, all of the above assumes that these games exist as something that runs directly from the CD. If these are install and uninstall things, then even if the parts were developed in Flash, getting them to work under Linux is probably no different from any other application.
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See new answer for updated information that games run from EXE. In this case, it looks like your problem is not to run these games on Linux, your problem is to run them without a CD.
Regarding the possibility of recompilation, if the games are installed from the CD, then even if the content of the game is Flash, it looks like the container is a normal Windows application being installed. (Unless it is an Adobe AIR application, but I assume you would mention it.) In that case, recompiling the Flash content will do nothing, because the CD validation will undoubtedly be part of the logic of the win application, and not done from within Flash.
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