ahh, i cant go any higher then. i use an external oscillator anyway because thats the way i was shown how to do it. everything seems to be working fine now. i had a bug that looked like the serin command wasnt running fast enough but i turned out to be the wait() part.

the way ive solved it has created another question. the chips must wait for 250 and their own unique ID before doing something. that bit works fine but i want to be able to send a command that resets their ID no matter what it is.

the code im using now is
serin2 porta.2,16468,2000,nocmd,[wait(250,address),cmd,val]

can i tell it to do something if it gets 251 and anything *aswell*? if not then i have a backup plan but i would rather do it that way