Custom Syslinux Splash Screens

While rolling a custom CentOS 5.2 distribution, I wanted to create a custom splash screen rather than use the vanilla CentOS jpg file. Since the existing splash screen was a JPEG file with a size of 640x480, I created my own JPEG file with the same dimensions. It didn't work. Just showed a blank background.

There seems to be little documentation on this problem, at least that I could find. Those with a problem who posted to a forum on the web never seemed to get a good response from the community. Hints were few. Saw a few about a special file format (lss, I believe it was). There were some comments about 8-bit color. There were some posts that said that syslinux couldn't display PNG files.

Finally, I created a 8-bit PNG file and just tried it and it worked! At least for syslinux 3.36. I believe the latest version as of this writing is 3.75, but I can't use that because of dependencies I don't want to resolve in the distro.

SOLUTION: 8-big PNG, 640x480.