cross-posted from: https://rabbitea.rs/post/212623
I was having an email conversation with Stoo Cambridge, and he mentioned that he was having trouble making his Linux machine display thumbnails of Amiga IFF/ILBM files. It turns out I have a solution for him, so I am sharing it here to help anyone else.
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… email conversation with Sensible Software legend Stoo Cambridge, and …
Nice that the solution for this is so trivial, if you want it. Always a bit of a security concern though with these venerable old file formats (and certainly, no modern machine wants the colour palette in interleaved bitplanes) where the loading technique was generally ‘map it into memory, and treat it like a struct’. ILBM isn’t as complicated as eg. TIFF, but buffer overruns and pointer shenanigans in dusty code is something to be wary of - I wouldn’t want this enabled by default
When was mapping files from unknown sources to structs okay? I’ve learned programming in late 90s/early 00s and at that time it was already advised against.
Imagemagick exists since 1987 though, so maybe it still has this kind of code somewhere.
Advised against in the late 90s since it was a pretty common habit from the dawn of computing through till the early 90s, and they’d finally realised it wasn’t the best of ideas, even if it was very very fast.
The number of times that Windows has been pwn3d by ‘legacy’ formats - images, font files, crazy stuff - that it’s attempted to parse for thumbnails is pretty crazy. There’s a lot of programmers writing unsafe code out there.
