Quote:

I suggest a binary 45 byte .pal file, with as contents 24-bit r,g,b data of the 15 colours.

Binary file formats are so last millennium. Use XML and all of a sudden you've got flexibility!

Some crazy ideas - not possible with the 45 byte binary format:

• different palettes for sprites and background
  
• different palettes per screen mode or
  
• RGB translation tables for the MSX2 bitmap modes (I mean: a translation table that translates MSX RGB values (0..7) into emulator RGB values (0..255), per channel)

Good idea, XML frameworks already exist in the mainstream MSX emulators. Though it will be troublesome for other, less complete, emulators to add XML support for something as trivial as external palettes.

Nah, it's pretty easy. There are very nice tiny libraries available that make it easy to parse XML. E.g. blueMSX includes TinyXML.