Of course, my general statement does not hold if the drawing functionality is a central part of your app and involves complex stuff hard to do using the API. In Ares, I referenced the backbuffer as a byte array and implemented the fake-phong rasterizer based on that.
On the other hand: setRenderingHints, setComposite and drawOval is worse than a hand-rolled antialiasing bresenham? Obviously, I don’t know any details …
When writing the algorithm yourself you can ofcourse sacrifice speed for code simplicity/size, so bresenham’s algo. might not be the best choice.
I hadn’t come across setComposite before, so thanks for that. It doesn’t do everything I need for Grav4k, but I may well find it useful in the future.
I’m doing fillOval , which is simpler than drawOval. I’m also, as Abuse suggested, sacrificing some speed for simplicity.
Comprehension dawns … still thinking too much from a performance point of view. Of course you could get away with evaluating a distance function per pixel, especially if you use a lut, and for filling antialiasing would be cheap. Nice one, pjt33, and thanks for the clarification, abuse!
A bit Off-topic,
I found today Elite Plus for DOS boxed for $6.00. It's on two 5 1/4 floppies!! But 150 pages manual its pure game design gold.5,25" floppies?!?! What did you do with those? Got a toaster with a USB port? ;D Anyhow, the novel included in the manual alone is worth the price!
Still playing it on DOS-Box. By the way, the original Elite was about 22k in size … so quite a challenge to wrestle it down to 4k, despite all the help the api provides.
Brief status update: Finished the second iteration last week and ended up at 5.5k compressed. Now coding the third iteration, with many new ideas … there is hope 
It looks like the space sim part (including models and all string resources for the trade sim) will end up at 3.2k, so at least a streamlined version of the trade sim should be possible.
Stuff I definitely had to drop: Station and docking (you just fly straight at the planet until you automatically land), Thargoids, multi-galaxy, tribbles ;D.
Stuff that exceeds the original elite: Flat-Shaded graphics 
and the option to purchase a new ship (as a long-term motivation)
Galaxy size is 1024 systems. Boa, Mamba, Kraith, Viper and Cobra are included. So is asteroid mining, cargo pickup, refuelling at sun.
Nuff said, now I better go and live up to the promises