3 - with a very old LCD

heh Actually, I blame people like for cryptic names of C++ functions... I know a few decades ago consiness was important, but I don't like that in C++ programmers still do this, even though you can easily use self explaining names these days and aren't limited by memory size.

Depends on what you mean by a "normal" cast... 1. If you mean a C-style cast (ie: (uint32) <something> ), then my answer would be that the code is C++ and the correct thing to do is to use the new style casts provided by the C++ language. They are there for a good reason. 2. If you mean, why did I not just allow implicit casting to uint32 by the compiler, it's because assigning a double value to an unsigned long produces a warning message ('possible loss of data') depending on the warning level set for the compilation. Since I compile at the higher warning levels and will see the warning, and have a policy of not allowing warnings from my code, I do the explicit cast. The issues I touched on above are very well described and explained at this site: C++ FAQ Lite. This is a great site for beginners and seasoned c++ programmers.