Panel de Pon player board generation procedure

Panel de Pon stores the 14 possible initial layouts for the player's board as lists of 6 bytes saying how many panels are in each of the columns, going from left to right. The full list goes as follows:

6,4,5,5,5,5
4,5,6,5,5,5
5,5,5,5,4,6
5,6,5,6,3,5
6,5,6,1,6,6
6,0,6,6,6,6
6,6,6,0,6,6
6,1,6,5,6,6
3,6,6,6,3,6
6,3,6,6,6,3
6,4,6,6,2,6
6,5,6,6,1,6
6,2,3,7,6,6
5,7,3,6,6,3

Let's take the second-to-last one as an example. If that one is chosen by the game, the board will look like this:

------------
------------
------------
------------
------------
------[]----
[]----[][][]
[]----[][][]
[]----[][][]
[]--[][][][]
[][][][][][]
[][][][][][]

Once the game has chosen a layout to use, it will begin to fill in random colors for the panels from bottom to top, left to right, using the following algorithm:

1. Before starting, check to see if the current column is empty, and skip to the next one if so.
2. Generate a random 8-bit value (can be anywhere from 0-255.)
3. Mask away the high nybble (the 4 highest bits) to get a value from 0-15.
4. Check to see if the value is 0 (corresponds to an empty space), and throw away the value and go back to step 2 if it is.
5. Compare the value against a given limit for the number of colors, and throw the value away and go back to step 2 if it exceeds that limit.
6. Compare the value to the color of the last panel the game generated, and throw away the value and go back to step 2 if they match.
7. Compare the value to the color of the space to the left, and throw away the value and go back to step 2 if they match.
8. If the value passes all these tests, set the color of the current space to this value, move to the next space, then return to step 1.