SLADE woes, texture color loss?

I'm having strange behavior from SLADE lately, namely that textures from certain texture wads show up as 2-bit images (black and white, no 256 RGB glory), when viewed in SLADE. The wads in question yield fine results when run with ZDoom, no color loss. I figured I need a resinstall of SLADE to get it to work, but the 32-bit Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 Runtimes that newer versions of SLADE links is now a 404. Help?

The only wad that I've gotten to work without texture color loss in my current version of SLADE (3.0.2.) is Doom2.wad

Keep in mind that the Doom picture format does not contain any color information -- pixels are just described by their palette index, which means that you actually need to have a palette. The palette is contained in the IWAD (it's the PLAYPAL lump) so when you look at doom2.wad in SLADE 3, it can find the palette without problem.

But when you don't have doom2.wad opened and you look at something without a palette, how should it know what the colors are?

Let me bring to your attention a part of SLADE's UI:


If you set your base resource archive to doom2.wad, SLADE will always look into it when it seeks a resource that it doesn't find in the opened wad, so it'll find Doom II's PLAYPAL and your images will have their colors.

Also, you can use the palette chooser drop-down to override the palette it would normally use.

When you get grayscale pictures instead of the expected colorful ones, it means that you don't have an override palette specified AND the current archive doesn't have a palette AND you don't have a base resource archive (or the BRA doesn't have a palette). In this case it has no idea what to use for a palette, and it defaults to a grayscale one.

Thanks Gez!