Turns out that the name doesn't accurately describe what it does.
It is correct for images that come with their own palette or are true color.
But for images using the game palette it doesn't use the red channel to determine translucency but the palette index! Ugh...
This means it cannot be done with a simple operation in the shader because it won't get a proper source image. The only solution is to create a separate texture.
- removed gl_vid_compatibility. With the bump to 1.4 no hardware requiring this flag is supported anymore.
- disabled 16 bit framebuffers for the same reason. As a conseqence all code for rendering without stencil could also be removed.