Well, I made the darkest brown in my version more purplish as I agree with you. Not sure about the mid-range purple, but it does seem to help break up the grey/brown/blue colours of the original!

I guess it really does depend on what gfx the colours are being used for.

For the speccy, I think a foreground and background colour chosen from 16 colours would have worked better. But really, it had no real custom chips and was very basic and simple (but cheap). It still worked as a computer, so I don't think we can really complain. There is always another feature we would have liked classic computers to have, and now with super PC's we are still not satisfied!

B.O.B. I've just gone through this thread and you have some great pixeling work here. But I see two things that affect every bit of your art:

1. You put too much detail into everything, making it hard to tell what things. It overwhelms the eye with detail.
2. Some scenes are so busy that the eye doesn't know where to look, foregrounds and backgrounds merge together. Different areas have the same colours, contrast or satuation.

As an experiment could you please draw something very simple without any real details. Then shrink it down by 400% and see if it is still easily recognisable and looks good. If not, work on the large version again until the small version looks great too.

I think that would help. I hope this proves useful, I wish I had your skills!

Ok. After another test I think it's safe to remove the pink and use the bright orange instead. For small sprites it's very similar. Ironically enough, those two dark grey-blues get in the way a bit if I try to add a darker blue, and the purple/brown does the same if I try to add a darker red. I don't think we need any more grey's, greens or oranges, and I'm not sure if a darker blue is needed. Because of that, and the tendency for the colours to shift in saturation and hue as they darken I thought it best to add a mid-range violet-indigo colour which can be used on it's own, with the dark blue or the grey-blue's or purple-brown. This could be used for sea, sky and other more moody lighting and dark pieces. Since the palette was missing purples and violets previously, I think this helps fill out the colour range a bit more now.

(HappyMonster v2)

The dark greys look ok to me, but I have a LCD monitor which has more difficulty with colours than a CRT. 
It's a pity pink is used so rarely (but importantly), it could let us fit in a more used colour..

EDIT: With regard to the red, I like the blueness aspect of the original, it makes it more interesting to me than normal reds.

Please don't feel you have to change anything in your palette if you don't want to.. it was mainly for my personal curiosity and use.