So not a huge deal, but it would nice to see if there was something where I could just straight chose 9bit palette (which I can probably do in Photoshop more easily than I'm doing, but...) so that I can match up the #000-#888 numbers a little more easily.
There are converted color charts show all the colors, and then some mapped logically or HSL like this -
http://pcedev.net/gfx_tools/ . Those are just some rough ones.
Photoshop have a nice feature - posterize. Set the levels 8 to force to 3bit R/G/B. Or you can manually edit a palettized picture using R/G/B *36 entries. N*32 tends to be to dark, but 36 increments shifts back down to 3bit just fine and looks better in PS too. Looks closer.
I actually use photoshop to manage my tilesets/palettes and even build maps. Set the grid to 8x8 and 'snap' on, and copy paste my tiles. I use mask layers(50%) to keep track of which tiles belong to which palette set:
I currently embed the subpalette code into the colors themselves. The slight differences between the increment signifies the associating subpalette.
//R,G,B
array = { 0,0,0
0,0,1
0,1,0
1,0,0
1,0,1
1,1,0
//etc
}
If(n>0) { converted_value=n*(36-array[(sub_pal*3)+i]); }
else { converted_value=array[(sub_pal*3)+i]; }
i = red(0), green(1), or blue(2).
n=0 to 7.
I export all the tileset ACT palettes and run it through my util and create a master 256 color palette with each subpalette being one of 16 groups of color and each group having its own unique identifying colors per segment. I force the final layer to 8bit and this master palette. Photoshop resnaps the colors of the whole picture into the proper ranges. On the receiving side, for the entire picture (or FMP 1.0 file) I just treat of the upper 4bits of the 8bit pixel as the subpalette number and the lower 4bits as direct pixels.
That's if you have larger more complex palette arranged tilemaps. For smaller/simpler projects, you can just keep track of the tiles by hand and use the directives of Mkit (PCEAS) for facilitating that. My current project had 1350 unique tiles and there's no way I was going to keep track of that by hand, let alone if I need to make modifications and shuffle tiles.