Monthly Archives: October 2013

Fakemode (fake 18-bit hicolor mode)

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Fakemode (fake 18-bit hicolor mode) was used in scene demos and intros around 1995-1997 to display more than 256 colors on plain VGA cards when hicolor modes were still not popular and not quite standardised. It uses normal 256 color mode. Three rows of pixels are used to display each of the color component and on very old crt monitors they will blend into single row of hicolor pixels. That’s right – first line – shades of red, second – green, third – blue. Because VGA has only 64 shades of each component it uses only 192 (3×64) colors from the 256 color palette. The biggest drawback of this mode is 3 times lower vertical resolution.

Some examples: Gustar by Camorra, Transgression 2 by mfx, Bill G Force by Komplex.
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Lossless FLAC internet radio stations

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There are a few internet radio stations streaming in lossless flac format. Sound quality should be identical to the audio cd, but your download speed should 1.2 Mbit/s or higher (bitrate is typically between 900-1200 kbit/s). One on these stations is Absolute Radio from the UK. They’ve got also streams with music from various decades from 60s to 00s. If Ogg FLAC ~1Mb streams aren’t working at the moment try AAC+ 128k. Try also the foobar2000 music player. Additional flac stream list is available here.

Update: Absolute Radio is now only available from the UK and Absolute Radio flac, vorbis and opus streams are down. I’ve provided the highest quality aac steam links routed through some random uk proxy servers that seem to work in the foobar2000 outside the UK but without the track names.

Absolute Radio (UK)
Official website - list of all streams
Server status+list of working mountpoints
ČRo D-dur (classical station - Czech Republic)
ČRo D-dur - flac 48 kHz
Other ČRo stations - vorbis 224 kbps
EuroparadioJazz
EuroparadioJazz - flac stream
EuroparadioJazz - main page
Fréquence 3
Fréquence 3 - flac stream
Fréquence 3 - main page