ok sweet i will first become aquainted to xlib then celtic

since all my games/programs use decimals (guess I can just Int([A] and run the command as Ans/whatever..)

So I'm not alone!  I submitted a bug report to Iambian, and he said the next release of Celtic III should have that problem fixed.

How many different decimal values do you use?  I've been thinking (for Chip's Challenge) that for the string tilemapper to sort of code them into the hex value.  For example, in CC there are 10 tiles that are walkable that either do nothing or have miscellaneous effects (like switches or the guy that takes your items) and 3 tiles that are walkable but change the tile to a blank space (like dirt) (items fall into another category although they would fit here).  I could make it so that the high-order nibble of the hex location being "0" indicates it's one of these 13 tiles, and if the low-order nibble is >=A then change the ground.  I still don't have all this mapped out, but so far it seems like a pretty good substitute for decimals.