[quote]I guess the best alternative would to be just open up a JFrame with text field, set it to monospace, black background, and then go crazy with whatever string editing based graphics engine that suits you. Sure it’s not quite a console, but it’s close.
[/quote]
It kind of defeats the point though. I only used the colored rectangle extended ASCII characters for my games. You might as well just declare something like the game is played in 80 x 60 resolution with 16 colors, but you can scale that image up to 640 x 480 (each pixel is effectively an 8x8 block).
Ok am in! Have spent all day coding my soon to be first 4K game… Not an ascii shootem-up this time 
Hope I wasnt misunderstood before. I dont give a monkeys about winning, I was just trying to emphasize the high quality of the games produced this year.
Only gripe (having just read the comp rules) is that it must be webstartable. Were applets not allowed in previous years? (Have seen the link to create the jnlp file, will try this when game is complete!). Out of inerterest how long does it take you guys to start a WebStart 4k Game? On average they take a minute to load on my laptop. Is this normal or something wrong with my configuration?
You can webstart applets these days
Kev
Webstarting my games usually takes me about 5 minutes to create the JNLP and sign the JAR and everything, which certainly isn’t too bad. As for running a 4k webstart, it takes only a few seconds for me.
I have version 0.2 of my possible entry in 2kB. However, I expect I will score better if I use the remaining 2kB for polish than trying to get bonus marks for file size.
Appel said he was going to change the rules to allow Applets: http://www.java-gaming.org/index.php/topic,19493.msg154983.html#msg154983
On a computer with security, once you click through the warning message about download files, warning message about running downloaded files, finding the pop up window because you got bored and clicked on something else, yea, a JNLP file will take about a minute to load. 
On a computer with no security, they should pop up within a few seconds. They do however, install themselves as a program (on Windows based PCs anyway). So you have to clean them up every-so-often. Easiest way is via the Java control panel -> View Temporary Internet Files.
In my view, applets are much more user friendly (however, not as coder friendly). …Rant over. ;D
I have a curious situation where my applet runs fine via webstart and does nothing obvious when embedded in HTML. I think it may be because I don’t override paint, but haven’t got round to investigating yet. I think using an applet rather than an application probably saves a byte or two - instead of main() you override start(), but you don’t have to call your own constructor or show().