I must admit that haze is not my cup of tea. I never looked much deeper into the matter and, as you will see in the following chapters, neither did most people.
One of my readers, which proves that I'm not preaching in the desert, was justifiably outraged by that imprecision. So I will correct here my ..., the word is uttered,... mistake.
Haze files are longer than palette files. The latter only enumerates the RGB values of each of the 256 colors in their order from 0 to 255 and are 768 bytes long. The former are a suite of 16 "masks", 0 to 15, gradually obfuscating the palette, from "clear as a bell" to "pea soup", and are 4096 bytes long.
That same person was kind enough to send me a program that let you go much deeper into observing haze files; Hazer, by Bert Vierstra. He was six hours too late as, through my own research, I had found this program at FlightSim under the name hazer101.zip. You will find the search engine of FlightSim HERE, simply type, or copy/paste, the name hazer101.zip in the "File name" window (you must be "logged in" first before downloading).
I, nevertheless, thank him for having taken the time to let me know. I consider my work to be of an investigative nature, not a treatise on FS knowledge. In other words, I'm not Moses bringing the Tablets of the Law under his arms, simply an average Joe experimenting and conveying to others his findings while having fun doing it.
And, talking of fun, here is fs5.pal being progressively obfuscated by fs5.haz;
Neat, don't you think? This is what you will get with Hazer.
I'm now wondering where TexBMP found its palette for fs5.haz...
So, next time, it will be back to chapter 8. Unless someone else has something to add.
In the final HTML version, I will probably modify chapter 7 consequently to look very bright. ;-)