+// determine the kind of transparency we need for this image: if the only alpha
+// values it has are 0 and 0xff then we can simply create a mask for it, we
+// should be ok with a simple mask but otherwise we need a full blown alpha
+// channel in wxImage
+//
+// parameters:
+// ptr the start of the data to examine
+// x, y starting position
+// w, h size of the image
+// numColBytes number of colour bytes (1 for grey scale, 3 for RGB)
+// (NB: alpha always follows the colour bytes)