that idea about putting the address into a variable and using if-then is how i had it in the first place. the trouble i had is that it would fire when the string gets sent out and try to read the first bunch of bytes. if the address didnt match it would return to serin but by that time the rest of the data has already passed.

there is only 1 string that gets sent out of the PC but that string has the values for all the chips in it