This post continues the investigation that began with “This is not RLE”. If the first post was about dismantling assumptions, this one is about replacing them with certainty. Back then, we had a decoder that worked, a pile of strange patterns, and a growing suspicion that the name RLE was little more than a historical artifact. Now, after walking the bitstream one bit at a time and validating every rule against a real corpus, the format is no longer a black box. It has structure, semantics, and — finally — a specification. When I started digging into this format, I expected some variation of classic run-length encoding. What I found instead was closer to a tiny virtual machine for pixels. Yes, there are runs, but there are also signed deltas, literal spans, and a single bit-cursor shared across colour channels. Nothing is byte-aligned, nor accidental: every bit participates in reconstructing UI artwork that was never meant to be seen outside its original renderer. The Turning Point:…
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