is there anything wrong with this in a .bat or .cmd for windows?
java MainClass
that is what i normally see and usually works 
Well that’s only really an option with a few class-files, otherwise you get this big mess of packages (dir-trees) with tiny class-files.
It’s cleaner to wrap it all up in a jar.
yeah , i maent that i havent seen a bat file that doesnt work for obvious reasons yet.
I’m with blah^3*h on this one. I hope to encourage gamers to acknowledge the benefit and beauty of Webstart and let them see quality games run smoothly using it. Rather than submit to the idea that the ignorant potential buyer will look more highly on an .exe than a webstart app, I hope to be part of the army to educate them 
But if your rely on those ‘ignorant’ players, ditch WebStart (for win32) and make yourself some kicker EXEs.
You can add webstart as an alternative way to launch your game. Once they see the benefits, they’ll switch, not a minute earlier.
[quote]I’m with blah^3*h on this one. I hope to encourage gamers to acknowledge the benefit and beauty of Webstart and let them see quality games run smoothly using it. Rather than submit to the idea that the ignorant potential buyer will look more highly on an .exe than a webstart app, I hope to be part of the army to educate them
[/quote]
Oh, I’m all for that. 
It’s just that right now, JWS is not the way to go in some circumstances if you want to make money. One of the (better) reasons some people hate JWS is that they feel out of control. They can’t archive it, so when they have to reinstall for example, the game is gone unless the server where he got it from still exists (if he even remembers where he got it from).
So if you do a proper distribution which most people will install, in many cases you’ll be better off making it downloadable. Of course it looks better to wrap it in an exe for the final distro, but until then, a simple .bat file is perfectly fine as far as I’m concerned.
Of course in other cases, JWS is the preferred distribution over an exe. For example, my emulator stores scores on the internet. This is not as straightforward to develop as internet high scores in your own games, so there’s bound to be some bug here and there which will send bogus scores to the internet.
Using JWS, I can make (almost) sure that people who play will have the latest version and that there will be no old distro’s around that send bogus scores. Since I host the high scores, it makes me more in control over them.