Two quickies! I hope! Does Ada have routines for displaying numbers in Hex or Octal (preferably Hex)? I would write a recursive function to do this, but recursion isn't something i'm confident with. It'd go something like divide by 16 taking remainder each time and append the result to front of string, stopping when number is 0, i think. It'd be nice if Ada did it for us though. Most of the books only mention mod/integer display in decimal, and i can't afford that �57.00 book covering the 'whole' of the Ada language and standard libraries. {books are really expensive -- i've been out �400-�500 on books this academic year alone. I moan too much!!!} I'm using mod types to simulate registers in the RISC machine. I'm about to implement arithmetic operations but i've thought of a problem. How do i detect overflow? e.g. say it was 1 byte reg 25*158 is too big. 12+254 is too big also. but mod types wrap round, so how do i detect the overflow? This is a bugger, cos' i've implemented quite a bit of the RISC computers base like Registers and Memory (thanks to Tucker Taft for the VMem like suggestion, it's almost working). Thanks for everyone's help, Chris Campbell