What the heck am I doing wrong?

[andywpg]

I'm having some trouble figuring out something and hope someone here can help.

I am doing a project to control the marker lights on a pace car for a race track. We will have
strobes on the four corners and on the front of the mirrors, as well as four lights on the rear
that will indicate 'pass left', 'pass right' and 'do not pass'.

To that end, I have decided to use a 'time slice' scheme to control the lights. Based on switch
inputs, there will be word or long-sized 'patterns' of bits to turn the outputs on or off, then a pause
and move on to the next bit in the pattern.

My problem is figuring out how to shift the bits out of the patterns to turn the output ports on and off.

I had thought of using SHIFTRIGHT (>>) to shift the bits off the LSB end of the pattern to turn the
port on or off based on it being a one or zero, but it would appear that SHIFTRIGHT discards the shifted
bit and won't let it be used.

My other thought was to use an index to address the bits individually, but I don't think this will work
either. For example:

pattern var byte 'may be a word or even long in the actual program
index var byte

pattern = 01010101  'example pattern, not all will be this regular

for index = 0 to 7
    PORTB.0 = pattern.index 'turn portb.0 on or off based on whether the bit is 0 or 1
    pause 100
next index

For some reason, the 'percent' sign vanished - it's supposed to be 'percent' 01010101

I'm pretty sure that won't work either. What am I doing wrong? Any ideas how I can accomplish this? I know there
must be a way, I'm just missing it. Perhaps a 'bit array'? Is that even possible?

Thanks for any help,

Andy