List of the Old Skool palettes

[Gil]

I agree it is the best, but it can still be better

Arne did a great job on his, though it favors a certain kind of look. You can't get THE best palette with only 16 colors. There's always going to be stuff that can't be done pleasingly on a small fixed palette.

As for your example image, it's far from subtle in the dark range. Try to picture a situation in very very dim light and try to pixel it. There's no colors in between that dark blue/purple color and black. Imo, that's a huge luminance jump. I don't consider the dark blue to be a very dark color, yet the next thing is full on black.

Ah well, I'm a bright color person anyway, so it doesn't really matter for me.

[Helm]

You can use asslace mode to make everything darker if you wish.

[Gil]

Yep, true enough, for a totally dark scene that'd work 

[Mathias]

Official names are on this page.

http://www.pepto.de/projects/colorvic/

The holy grail of C64!!!! Yes!

[Ai]

For completeness' sake, PC-Engine / TurboGrafx:
Sprites or tiles could use one of 32 sets of 15 colors + transparency from a 512-color master palette; the first 16 sets were usable for tiles, the second 16 for sprites. In the case of tiles, the 0th color is not used for transparency, but must still be the same between all 16 of the tile palettes.

The available RGB intensities are:
   00 24 49 6d 92 b6 db ff
(RGB 8*8*8 == 512)

[Mathias]

This is a noteworthy excerpt from that above linked page on pepto.de. I'm not sure how long that bit at the bottom has been there - the email from Robert 'Bob' Yannes.

Notice he says, this,

"I'm afraid that not nearly as much effort went into the color selection as you think. Since we had total control over hue, saturation and luminance, we picked colors that we liked. In order to save space on the chip, though, many of the colors were simply the opposite side of the color wheel from ones that we picked. This allowed us to reuse the existing resistor values, rather than having a completely unique set for each color."

The C64 palette toted as being the best severely limited palette of it's time, and it's certainly adored even now. According to that excerpt, the colors were chosen rather haphazardly, and not with complicated color theory principles in mind. Sounds like hardware geeks picked the colors out based on their preference at the time, hehe. Oh well, it works.