University of South Carolina, School of Public Health, Department of Health Administration, Economics Interactive Tutorials Sept. 27, 2000

Mac note for roulette simulator

Netscape 4.x on the Mac seems to drop some Java repaint() instructions. As a result, when the simulation pauses for you to decide whether to go on or not, parts of the display you see are one step behind what you are supposed to be seeing. When the top line tells you that you have lost $10, the panels below may show your net gain as $-9, not $-10 as it should be.

We found this behavior on an iMac and on a G4, running OS 9.

The workaround is to force Netscape to repaint the applet on your screen. To do that you can:

Maybe the next version of Netscape for the Mac will do better. Netscape for Windows does not do this.

Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) for the Mac is worse! IE for the Mac will not fully load the Risk tutorial.  It runs out of memory, no matter how much memory we give IE. Even on a G4 with 256MB of memory and no other applications running,
IE runs out of memory before it has loaded half of the Risk tutorial applets!

Use your browser's Back command to return to the referring page..


Mac users: Please let me know if you experience the difficulties described here, or if you don't experience them. If you have solutions, I am especially interested!