> They’re not tiled, like you might expect. Instead, each sprite is sliced into rows per pixel, like paper through a shredder, and rearranged into a single row in the big image. To reconstruct a sprite, we must reverse the process.

For most imaging libraries this format would be the natural order, so it would be as simple as providing a pointer to the beginning of the buffer, and the width and height of the image, and the library will simply read the image from the provided byte stream.

Reading data from a tiled image would be more work (unless the image is 1 tile wide)