its very nice that this discussion gets along frame rates. now i would like to drive it in the area of collision detection  

*if my post isnt placed well here, im sorry, an admin should move it to an own thread then.*

years ago i made a arkanoid clone by myself and i got fast to some collision issues.
best way to animate smoothly is to have a coordinate and a direction vector, which gets scaled based upon the passed time.
this can cause the problem that if the computer is late on drawing and the direction vector gets too long, the ball could jump over small obastacles without noticing any collision. same problem occurs if the ball's speed is very high.
i solved the problem with calculating each pixel of movement and testing collision for these positions (so many tests for one frame). this is a pretty save but expensive way.

i know is started such a thread long time ago, but the
solutions(?) were a little academically (i remeber some words like raycasting - perhaps a little too heavyweight for breakout ...)

Well I tried to post the code but the forum software says it is too long so the link is:

http://www.scottshaver2000.com/ImageFunctions.java

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http://www.appletmaker.com/appletmaker/