The compressed one is also larger than the uncompressed one...
Edit:
I'll try with some ideas.
You said you noticed how the first byte of the image appears to be the image width minus 1, yeah? The byte after that is usually 0x00.
Perhaps that means the top of the decompressed image is all 00s. So Transparent.
Another curious thing I noticed while looking at STAR5000 and STAR2000 is, they should be the same size (8x8), but STAR2000 his larger.
So the compression may be a bit tricky to figure out.
Edit:
I'll try with some ideas.
You said you noticed how the first byte of the image appears to be the image width minus 1, yeah? The byte after that is usually 0x00.
Perhaps that means the top of the decompressed image is all 00s. So Transparent.
Another curious thing I noticed while looking at STAR5000 and STAR2000 is, they should be the same size (8x8), but STAR2000 his larger.
So the compression may be a bit tricky to figure out.