Oh, it's real fun trying to deliberately work with 8-bit paletted images these days.
I don't want to install the "yeah we always knew that was a disability slur, we did it on purpose, WONTFIX" Image Manipulation Program. Krita's devs have answered "can I see the actual palette of an indexed image?" before with basically "Um, Actually, why would anyone even want to??? WONTFIX".
Am I going to have to install something that pretends its UI is an upscaled Amiga 320x200 one with great big fucken pseudopixels For The Aesthetic? Fuck, I hope not
I am resorting to Python to work out what various state the internals of my files are even in. First discovery: the command-line tool I was using to ensure these files were 256-color might have been doing that, but was...writing out 24-bit BMPs with only 256 unique pixel values in.
ffffffu—
Second discovery: the multiple online sources casually going "haha, for all practical purposes you'll never have to worry about which version of a BMP file you have: just assume the info header is the 40-byte-long vertsion!" can get fucked, because these files (after causing me a little confusion) most definitely have the 124-byte version that Microsoft added in...
NT 5.0, aka Windows 2000,
Me: okay so I figured out the fucking incantation to convert PNGs to actual 8bpp BMPs, with no fucking terrible RLE compression, and the hex dump of the pixel data from my Python hackery still doesn't look right—
Some ancient fragment of Windows 3.1 programming knowledge, rising from the depths of my mind like Tennyson's kraken, Cthulic, tentacular, gibbering in Zalgo-text: Windows DIBs are upside down!
Me: ...fuck, that's what it is, isn't it?
