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I posted a question here a few months ago about ways to turn an AS3 executable into programs that would run on Windows, Macintosh, and mobile devices. Got some good answers, including somebody mentioning MDM Zinc. At the time MDM Zinc was $800, it has been reduced in price to $360, so I decided to try it.

Using the trial version, I can create an EXE file that generally seems to work OK. However, it does not stream the files it is supposed to stream. If I use http://swf-to-exe.com/ I get an EXE that works fine, but I need to offer compatibility on Macs and mobile devices.

Here's the code that I'm using that works using SWF-to-exe but does not work with Zinc:

fileAddress = "http://xxxxxxxx.com//xxx//xxxxx//" + songName + ".mp3";
request = new URLRequest(fileAddress);
track = new Sound();
track.load(request);

Please note that I have replaced the actual URL with x's. The program works just fine with the actual URL, but the program put together by Zinc does not.

I have sent two requests to the support department at MDM Zinc without any response. In fact, there was supposed to be an immediate "we received your email" which never showed up. Is MDM Zinc going out of business?

In case you are wondering, here is a link to the original question:

[Converting SWFs to EXEs

There seem to be a number of ways to do this, but I'm trying to find a quick way. I thought that MDM Zinc might be the right one. Apparently not.

If you know how to make Zinc access things on the internet, please let me know.

Community
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TomJeffries
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  • That's a possibility. I'm trying to find easy ways to put the program together, but maybe AIR is the easiest way. – TomJeffries May 08 '14 at 23:31
  • I can tell you that the company I work for tried to make AS3 apps using Zinc before AIR was available, and they constantly ran into all kinds of problems. We switched over to AIR and now we have web/mobile/windows/mac apps all working the same way and functioning great, with not much effort as far as packaging them. – Karmacon May 09 '14 at 00:22
  • In that case, I'll drop trying to get Zinc to respond to questions and move to AIR. Thanks for letting me know. – TomJeffries May 09 '14 at 04:22
  • I've been using Zinc for years and whenever I've had a problem, yes there are peculiarities with zinc, I've turned to their forums and been provided an answer - it might be worth posting on the Zinc Forums before you jump ship. – dan-steel May 09 '14 at 10:54
  • Given the price of the product, if I have to post questions on a forum then I'd rather go with something that doesn't cost money. – TomJeffries May 09 '14 at 14:57

1 Answers1

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I've had similar problems loading sound files (and xml files for that matter) from the web. I found that changing "disable proxy" to false in the Zinc Application settings fixed it.

oldcoder
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  • I am marking this answer as the correct one because that fixes the problem with reading mp3 files from the web. I'm still not impressed with Zinc- the Win version of our executable is very, very slow, and neither the Win or Mac versions parses the string that indicates the jpg files I use as screen backgrounds. Fortunately having a working Mac version will help, although before we release this we'll need a better way – TomJeffries May 21 '14 at 17:36
  • I've never been greatly impressed either BUT I still use it for desktop cross-platform multimedia stuff. I've been using it since v2 so I guess I've worked through many of its various quirks. If you're loading your backgrounds from file at runtime you have to give the full path of the file to the Loader by adding the relative path to mdm.Application.path – oldcoder May 21 '14 at 18:10
  • Zinc does seem to be able to find the file if it is in the same directory. The version I was using before created reasonably quick files for Windows, unfortunately the current version is very slow. Too bad. – TomJeffries May 21 '14 at 23:16