Can I load 8bit bitmaps with Blender? After looking at the documentation about supported file formats on wiki, I tried to use 8 bit BMP files as texture. (I know, old school, but I wanted to avoid conversions)

However, the image appears blank in blender.

Is there anything I need to set (like a property, or parameter while importing) to be able to use an 8bit BMP image as texture?
When I convert these to PNG or 24b BMP there is no problem.
Also when I save something with mspaint as 8b BMP the same problem happens.

Note I used a python script to import these, image.load().
Support for loading 8bit bitmaps was just committed to trunk recently. Grab any build of r59103 or greater and it should work and it will also be available by default in 2.69.