Thomas Capricelli

The documentation is pretty terse: “160×80 pixels 16-bit (RGB656) BMP”. Here’s how it can be done, at least from linux, but probably also from most other operating systems.

From what I understand, neither gimp nor (imagemagick) convert can create them. That’s kinda shocking as those were the most obvious choices, and linux tools have a (well deserved) reputation of handling the most obscure and old formats of whatever.

Gimp bmp save dialog does provide some rudimentary options, but not those.

You could think convert would do it using something like this, but you would be wrong, the resulting file still uses 4 bytes per pixel, as confirmed by ls and file.

convert whatever.png -define bmp:subtype=RGB565 logoin.bmp
% ls -l logoin.bmp 
-rw-r--r-- 1 orzel users 51338 30 gen 20.08 logoin.bmp
% file logoin.bmp 
logoin.bmp: PC bitmap, Windows 98/2000 and newer format, 160 x 80 x 32, cbSize 51338, bits offset 138

Finally, what actually works is ffmpeg. The mhp50 will actually recognized a file created using this command line:

ffmpeg -i whatever.png -pix_fmt rgb565 -y logoin.bmp