I did as you said adding the 2 lines to .lax ran JEmplode (or tried to) & status.txt appeared in the folder but had nothing in it. When trying to run JEmplode I get this error and never get to the discovery part:

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: javax/swing/UIManager
at org/jempeg/empeg/emplode/Main.main
at java/lang/reflect/Method.invoke
at com/zerog/lax/LAX.launch
at com/zerog/lax/LAX.main