A normal CD+G karaoke player supports a 16-color screen (out of a palette of 4096) and on-the-fly palette changes. Through proper use of the palettes, it's possible to treat the screen as two 4-color screens and page-flip between them with an optional cross-fade effect.

Beyond the fact that the cross-fade effect looks cool, this makes it possible to draw on one screen while the other is being displayed. Provided that there's enough time between screen changes to fully draw the back screen (about three seconds for a full-screen 4-color image) the visual effect is that screen changes happen instantaneously.

BTW, while 4-color graphics may sound hopelessly primitive in this day and age of zillion-color displays, careful color selection can allow for some very nice effects.

To test this technique, I added a CD+G track to Lady and the Tramp's "Bella Notte". The text was very-slightly-bluish white; the backgrounds used two colors plus black and (in some cases) the foreground white for stars. While hardly "photographic quality", the resulting image quality is surprisingly decent. And having the cross fades occur with no "dead time" is quite nice.
-- supercat, Sep 17 2002

Karaoke is a disease, nay, a sickness, and those who practise it should be hunted down and ruthlessly exterminated.
-- 8th of 7, Sep 17 2002


Next up- Karaoke drunken off key fixer-upper..
-- Mr Burns, Sep 17 2002


It's an ingenious idea, but won't DVDs replace CD+G soon anyway for this purpose?
-- pottedstu, Sep 17 2002


I caught karaoke one night in my first year, my immune system was low because of alcohol intake. The symptoms included intense embarrasment and not being able to look any of my house mates in the eye for a couple of days
-- Zircon, Sep 17 2002



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