Where it says background color, that doesn't mean your bg lvz must be that color, it means the color of the background if there was no lvz "floor", ie the blackness of space. Colors may not look good in the zone itself if you didn't use the 256 color subspace palette (which you can get by viewing tiles.bm2, ships.bm2 uses the old ss palette). To get around this in cont. click options -> graphics, then change "color depth" to anything other than 8 (I use 16).