lightspark - RetroBIOS¶
Technical notes
Open source implementation of the Flash player, playing SWF files of any
ActionScript version, as a standalone application or as a browser plugin. The
ActionScript built-in classes are implemented in C++ under src/scripting/flash,
so no external class library is read. ES-DE runs the binary as
lightspark --fullscreen <rom>, Batocera as
lightspark -fs -s local-with-networking <rom> off a 0.8.7 pin.
Startup reads nothing. The two GLSL shaders sit in the tree as src/lightspark.frag and src/lightspark.vert but the preprocessor pulls them into string literals, "directly include shader source to avoid filesystem access" (src/backends/rendering.cpp:1042-1045,1062-1065), which is also how 0.8.7 builds them. The face given to nanoVG for text is Roboto Medium, decoded at runtime from a base85 array in the binary (src/launcher.cpp:1567, src/platforms/engineutils.cpp:500-502), and the launcher icon face is embedded the same way (src/launcher.cpp:1094-1096,1333). resources/openfonticons/OpenFontIcons.ttf and resources/ErrorConstants.xml are build inputs, the second feeding the errorconstants.{h,cpp} generator (tools/errorgen:20).
Fonts named by the content go through fontconfig, which answers with whatever face the host has installed: FcFontMatch then FcPatternGetString(FC_FILE) hands a path straight to nvgCreateFont (src/backends/cachedsurface.cpp:135-156). No name, path, size or hash is fixed anywhere, README:27-30 marks fontconfig itself optional, and an unmatched family leaves nanoVGFontID at -1 and falls back to the embedded face.
dataFileRead is the only reader of LS_DATADIR and has no callers, at this commit and at 0.8.7 (src/parsing/textfile.cpp:74-106). fontPath holds "TimesNewRoman.ttf" on Windows (src/backends/rendering.cpp:102) but reaches only cairo_select_font_face, which takes a family name rather than a path, and only under ENABLE_CAIRO (src/backends/rendering.cpp:1277), left FALSE by CMakeLists.txt.
Files the player writes rather than expects: lightspark.conf, an INI carrying the cache directory and prefix whose absence leaves the hardcoded defaults (src/backends/config.cpp:82-115), launcher.xml holding the recent entries (src/launcher.cpp:1299-1310), and .sol SharedObjects under the data directory (src/platforms/engineutils.cpp:849-914). application.xml, extension.xml and the library.swf files under META-INF/AIR/extensions belong to the AIR package being run (src/main.cpp:149, src/platforms/engineutils.cpp:785-800), and crossdomain.xml is fetched from remote hosts (src/backends/security.cpp:353,1025).
No BIOS or firmware files required. Generated on 2026-08-23T16:12:06Z