I have a hunch this has been done before but I am a total layman at this and don't know how to begin to ask the right question. So I will describe what I am trying to do...
I have an unknown ARGB color. I only know its absolute RGB value as displayed over two known opaque background colors, for example black 0x000000 and white 0xFFFFFF. So, to continue the example, if I know that the ARGB color is RGB 0x000080 equivalent when displayed over 0x000000 and I know that the same ARGB color is RGB 0x7F7FFF equivalent when displayed over 0xFFFFFF, is there a way to compute what the original ARGB color is?
Or is this even possible???
So, you know that putting (a,r,g,b) over (r1,g1,b1) gives you (R1,G1,B1) and that putting it over (r2,g2,b2) gives you (R2,G2,B2). In other words -- incidentally I'm going to work here in units where a ranges from 0 to 1 -- you know (1-a)r1+ar=R1, (1-a)r2+ar=R2, etc. Take those two and subtract: you get (1-a)(r1-r2)=R1-R2 and hence a=1-(R1-R2)/(r1-r2). Once you know a, you can work everything else out.
You should actually compute the values of a you get from doing that calculation on all three of {R,G,B} and average them or something, to reduce the effects of roundoff error. In fact I'd recommend that you take a = 1 - [(R1-R2)sign(r1-r2) + (G1-G2)sign(g1-g2) + (B1-B2)sign(b1-b2)] / (|r1-r2|+|g1-g2|+|b1-b2), which amounts to weighting the more reliable colours more highly.
Now you have, e.g., r = (R1-(1-a)r1)/a = (R2-(1-a)r2)/a. These two would be equal if you had infinite-precision values for a,r,g,b, but of course in practice they may differ slightly. Average them: r = [(R1+R2)-(1-a)(r1+r2)]/2a.
If your value of a happens to be very small then you'll get only rather unreliable information about r,g,b. (In the limit where a=0 you'll get no information at all, and there's obviously nothing you can do about that.) It's possible that you may get numbers outside the range 0..255, in which case I don't think you can do better than just clipping.
Here's how it works out for your particular example. (r1,g1,b1)=(0,0,0); (r2,g2,b2)=(255,255,255); (R1,G1,B1)=(0,0,128); (R2,G2,B2)=(127,127,255). So a = 1 - [127+127+127]/[255+255+255] = 128/255, which happens to be one of the 256 actually-possible values of a. (If it weren't, we should probably round it at this stage.)
Now r = (127-255*127/255)*255/256 = 0; likewise g = 0; and b = (383-255*127/255)*255/256 = 255.
So our ARGB colour was 80,00,00,FF.