I was just taking a look at the BMP file format specification, it is not particularly complex. In fact it makes a format like ILBM/IFF look complicated. You could quite easily write a BMP reader to handle planar/indexed images and simple output the results of your loading to a pixmap in 24 or 32-bit truecolor form. All you really need is a translation/interpretation between indexed color and truecolor as you load it.