First, a bit of background on how Palm devices display bitmaps. Palm devices come in different varieties: some can display a full set of colors, while other can only display simple black and white. Some can do settings in between. There are 5 levels that can currently be displayed: 1 bit, 2 bit, 4 bit, 8 bit and 16 bit. A 1 bit (monochrome) device cannot display an 8 bit picture, nor can it convert it to something it can display. Therefore, for a program to run on all possible devices, you need to supply bitmaps in all for levels.

Bitmaps are stored in your program as resources. NS Basic/Palm creates a bitmap resource for each bitmap you add to the program, and gives it the 4 digit ID number you see in the Project Explorer. You can add a list of up to 5 paths to images for a single bitmap resource. Make sure the images you add to your project already have the correct bit depth for the place you are assigning them!

Internally, NS Basic using a handy utility to do this called ResIn. It allows you to use .bmp, .gif, .jpg, ico, .emf or .wmf files as input: they are automatically converted to the special .bmp format that the Palm OS requires. It is in NS Basic Tools folder.

This same utility is used create color icons for your application.

Internally, the format of the ResIn command line is
ResIn.exe imageNames:n filename.prc resType resID

• imageName is the name of the image file. There can be up to 5. The value n following the image name is the bit depth. The images can be .bmp, .gif, .jpg, ico, .emf or .wmf format.
• filename.prc is the name of the project you have generated.
• resType is either Tbmp for a bitmap or tAIB for the icon
• resID is the four digit ID number from the IDE. If you are creating an Icon, use 1000.

Enabling gray scale on non-color Palm devices