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From: BGB <cr88192@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Byte ordering
Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2024 19:44:40 -0500
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On 10/4/2024 6:06 PM, MitchAlsup1 wrote:
> On Fri, 4 Oct 2024 19:05:15 +0000, BGB wrote:
> 
>> On 10/4/2024 12:30 PM, Anton Ertl wrote:
>>
>> Say, pretty much none of the modern graphics programs (that I am aware
>> of) really support working with 16-color and 256-color bitmap images
>> with a manually specified color palette.
>>
>> Typically, any modern programs are true-color internally, typically only
>> supporting 256-color as an import/export format with an automatically
>> generated "optimized" palette, and often not bothering with 16-color
>> images at all. Not so useful if one is doing something that does
>> actually have a need for an explicit color palette (and does not have so
>> much need for any "photo manipulation" features).
> 
> 1996 version of CorelDraw 3 suffers from none of this, supporting all
> sorts of pallets {RGB, CYM, CYMK, at least 3 more) with various
> user specified limitations, 24-bit, 32-bit, ... with all sorts of
> fillers mixing any 2 colors previous mentioned with various patterns
> {gradient, polka dot, you define which pixel gets from which color}.
> 
> Still have the CD-ROM if anyone wants to try.
> 

I didn't mean "colorspace" here, but say if one wants to use a 16-color 
palette, like, say:
   0=Black       (000000), 1=DarkBlue  (0000AA),
   2=DarkGreen   (00AA00), 3=DarkCyan  (00AAAA),
   4=DarkRed     (AA0000), 5=Magenta   (AA00AA)
   6=Brown*      (AA5500), 7=LightGray (AAAAAA),
   8=DarkGray    (555555), 9=LightBlue (5555FF),
   10=LightGreen (55FF55), ...
   15=White      (FFFFFF)

And then save as a 16-color BMP image with these specific colors at 
these specific indices.

*: Where there is variability in convention here between sort of a 
sickly dark yellow color and brown (Say: AAAA00 or AA5500).


1990s era versions of MS PaintBrush or MS BitEdit, "Yeah, sure".
Modern tools: "What even are you asking?..."

Or, say, one has a 256 color palette with N shades of M colors, and 
needs to draw an image specifically with those colors, ...

And one wants to draw at a low resolution by plotting individual pixels, ...



But, the old tools don't really run on anything newer than 32-bit WinXP.
Or, one can run them in Win 3.11 inside DOSBOx, but this is inconvenient.

One can draw with the colors they want in newer tools (in an RGB sense), 
but can't generally save in specific BMP variant with a specific 
manually-specified color palette.

Typically the tools only allow for an automatically generated 
"optimized" palette.


>>
>> And, most people generally haven't bothered with this stuff since the
>> Win16 era (even the people doing "pixel art" are still generally doing
>> so using true-color PNGs or similar).
> 
> Blame PowerPoint ... No more evil tool ever existed.

Dunno.

MS had some specialized tools in this era:
   BitEdit: Like PaintBrush but more versatile;
   PalEdit: Could specify color-palettes for use with BitEdit;
   IcoEdit: Like BitEdit but worked with icon / ICO files.
     Which, were like BMP but hard-wired to 32x32 16-color and similar.

....

MS PaintBrush became MS Paint and seemingly mostly got dumbed down as 
time went on. Modern versions of Paint can open PNG and JPG but is in 
most regards inferior to the early versions at pixel-editing tasks.


Closest modern alternative is Paint.NET, but still doesn't allow manual 
palette control in the same way as BitEdit.

But, then again, in contexts where I need such files, I can generally 
use converter tools.


>>