Background. Sigh.

[paolo]

The neon sign is looking much better in the new pic - the blue light reflecting off the building is good.

A couple of tips about making lights look realistic. Obviously you can't use a lighter colour than the lightest colour available in the palette, but you can deceive the eye in a couple of ways.

* make the light diffuse beyond the extent of the bulb/tube, blending this diffuse light gradually into the background as you get further from the light source
* darken the area around the light (the area into which you are blending the diffuse light, and the area immediately around this) to increase the contrast and give the illusion of increasing the brightness of the light

This could be used for the light coming from the windows as well as the light from the neon sign, although the light from the windows is probably less bright than the neon sign.

Sorry, no pics of my own because I'm no artist, but here are some photos that illustrate my points:

* Pic 1
* Pic 2
* Pic 3
* Pic 4

And don't worry about the number of colours - Trance-Pacific was a 32-bit game and had 65536 colours, and I had no problem with the palette in that game, so you're well below that limit.

I hope this helps!