About Whack-A-Dole

Don't imply anything about my politics from the applet (see my web page for that). It's just that nothing funny rhymes with "Clinton".

Issues, bugs... features!

Sound and double-buffering (to reduce the black flicker in the animation) are in the works, but I wanted to get this on the web before the election!

If you click on the "start" button and nothing happens, or if the game starts but the Bob Dole heads don't pop up, there's a very good chance you're behind a firewall. My error window alerting you to this pops up in every environment except Navigator. Sigh. Check the "Java Console" under the "Options" menu and see if it says "SecurityException" and/or "problem getting dole1.gif". Watch the space below for the downloadable version of WhackADole.

I don't consider WhackADole usable in any Macintosh Java environment I've tried (despite the fact that I developed it on a Mac PowerBook 160). The problems I've seen are:

• Netscape Navigator 3.0 -- Draws images so slowly (a 100x100 gif on my 25MHz PowerBook takes nearly a minute) that by the time it draws the Bob image, the thread thinks he's already gone and you're clicking on a closed box. That would account for all the negative scores reported by Mac users.
• "Apple Applet Runner" from MacOS Java Runtime -- Fast and stable. But it also corrupts the colors and sometimes even the alignment of the gifs.
• "Applet Viewer" from Sun's Mac Java Deleloper's Kit -- The first two or three times I try to run an applet that calls getImage, I get a NullPointerException. Then, for some unknown reason, it works. Unfortunately, in the case of WhackADole, it proceeds to crash with an out-of-memory error (at least for me).