how do I decompile a flash .exe file into a .swf one?

Question

Problem:
I want to decompile the .exe file of a Flash game into a .swf file (Adobe Flash file) so I can modify it

Answer 1

There is no way to turn a .exe into a .swf.

An .exe file is not a flash file and is not remotely compatible with .swf. The extension .exe stands for executable, meaning that it consists of machine code which gets run directly on the processor. A .swf acts as a fancy .zip archive containing assets and a form of cross-platform bytecode that is much more debugger friendly and contains lots of information about the code it was compiled from. Since a .swf is not an executable, you have to install a flash executable first which then is able to open a .swf, convert or interpret that intermediate bytecode into machine code, and runs your program.

That being said it is still possible to decompile a .exe into languages like C or maybe C++, but it is much harder and prone to breaking. You can refer to this page if you want to learn more about how that works: Is it possible to "decompile" a Windows .exe? Or at least view the Assembly?

Answer 2

For future reference: This post most likely talks about extracting the original .swf file from a "projector executable" created with Adobe Flash.

This bundles both a Flash Player and an SWF file together and creates a standalone executable. There is a simple extractor for this over at GitHub: https://github.com/laenion/dump_projector