Preserving 256-color palettes

[toxinMafs]

Is there a way to preserve a palette at 100% fidelity? I'm working with an old old game (Wolfenstein 3D) and an editing program which requires a very specific 256-color palette; how can I achieve this? Bitmaps. MS Paint does it automatically when you save the file to "256-color bitmap", but I can seem to get paint.net to do this. Thank you very much for help, and I'll be sure to pass along the information.

[toe_head2001]

I think it may be possible to hack together a save filetype plugin to do this using ImageMagick. A few questions...

 

Would you need it to reduce the colors in your images to 256, or are your images already limited to 256 colors?

If color reduction is needed, would you want both Dithered and Non-Dithered options?

 

Also a few technical questions for those that more informed than me:

Do 256 color bitmap files have a different Header than the standard 24-bit bitmaps, or is the only difference the reduced color palette?

Can you store any 256 colors in these files (eg: 256 shades of red), or is it limited to a standard list of predefined colors?

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Edit:

I guess I have the color palette question answered

 

...There is a standard Windows palette of 256-colors, but bitmaps can also have custom palettes....

In this case, we want to use Wolfenstein 3D's "very specific 256-color palette". For reasons of mass-appeal, that particular palette wouldn't be hardcoded in the plugin (or it would, but as one option of many).

Edited June 2, 2015 by toe_head2001