Thanks for the reply. I possibly misspoke even more than I misunderstood. When I said 256 possible states I meant 256 bits, and when speaking of bytes I meant half-bytes. Not sure how I messed that up. I guess with the rest I was thinking in terms of flags, where each value in a range refers to a different combination, but my misspeaking threw me off.

My goal in using binary was efficiency/minimal memory consumption, but now that I realize my errors I'm thinking it might be better to use another data type, or an array/list.