Hey IamBob,
I do not know if you ever succeeded with appletviewer. I wanted to do the same thing with gay.com chat. I yanked the applet tag and placed it into an html file. AV never liked any of the URLs I was feeding it locally. I had to place the html file on my website for AV to ven recognise the file. Work well for me, got a shell script to start it, but it is a pain that I cannot create a double-click to get to it.
HTH
Chris