Try setting your hi-color speech text to pure blue all the way over.
Now test your game.
It will show up as white.
It's an easy workaround; just drop one increment of red or green and it works.
Still, it's a bug so I report it.
Not really a bug.
Colors 0-15 are those of some standard 16 color palette (similar to the Paint one), while 16-31 is black - grey - white.
32-63 is black - dark blue - blue.
So to get a true $00F, just set the SpeechColor to 63.
I agree that this is confusing ... in AGS 3 the colour finder gives you a warning message about this when you select one of these colours.
Would it be very difficult to make the color finder return the proper values? For instance, hardcode RGB(31,31,31) to return 15 instead of 65503, which, on a full 256-unit RGB scale is actually (255, 250, 255)? I did this for my own RGB color module (now obsoleted by Game.GetColorFromRGB), because I needed the colors to match the ones I used in PhotoShop.
Also, color 2143 (1, 1, 31) is actually (8,8,255), not (0,0,255) so for exact color picking, the advice to set red and green to 1 isn't really useful. In most cases the difference will not be discernible, but for instance I had to insert a logo sprite onto a white background on an in-game webpage, and the edges of the white logo background were definitely visible.