That ought to work in general, but I can see two potential problems:
- if different hosts have different configured subnet masks, some will consider 192.168.0.255 to be a broadcast to the 192.168.0.0/24 network, others will consider it to be a specific computer in the 192.168.0.0/16 network.
- some operating systems or firewalls might drop broadcast echo replies, to avoid traffic multiplication bombs or similar attacks.
I don't know what the reason is, whether it's one of the two I thought of, or some other but: At home I have two macs at 192.168.0.3 and 192.168.0.4, and the router is at 192.168.0.1. If I ping 192.168.0.255, I get responses from the macs, but not the router. I have to ping 192.168.0.1 to get a response from the router.