Texture combining question

Hi all, on my journey to getting NVidia''s Dawn demo completely reverse engineered and working on a DX8 compatible system (I am limited to that really) I stumbled across another little thing. On various occasions NVidia doesn''t store the alpha channel for transparency together with the other three color channels but in a separate texture. They do that as they have different resolutions and formats of their color textures for GeForce FX and GeForce FX Ultra series. As DX8 only supports 4 texture stages (which are usually full when doing per-pixel lighting) I have to bake those two textures into one ARGB texture at load time. Now as I see it I have several possibilities: 1. Combine them using render-to-texture technique (hm, bit of a overkill really) 2. Decode the formats myself (too lazy to deal with DXT compression) 3. Use a 3rd party image library (my prefered way to go) So, if anyone knows a good image loading library that is published under the GPL and supports the most common texture formats (say, JPG, BMP, TGA, DDS) I''d be very happy to know about that... Thanks, Alex