> 16-bit are the ones that go into the 255,000 area right? 16 bit numbers go up to one less than 2^16, or 65,535. To get numbers as large as 255,000, you'd need to use at least 24 bit numbers. This would give you numbers up to 16,777,215. Since 24 bits is 3 bytes, using AHL routines would probably be your best bet.