hmmm 2 things: 1. how do you see the terminal 2. why are some comments big and others small? I know, they are totally unrelated...

I just remebered something: getClass().getResourceAsStream("filename goes here(relative to class file)") should work on applets. The InputStream returned supports the availabe() and read(byte[]) methods that you are using

int Reader.read() gets a 4 byte 2's compliment integer (also known as an "int" :) using the bitwise and operator, and then shifting, you can extract each of the four bytes such as given integer i, (i&0x00FF0000)>>>> Of course you can also just convert them normally. I'm not sure if this is as accurate though.