Thank you, that worked.
I looked at the look command and that is not quite what I'm looking for. What I'm after is being able to find what character code is at an x,y print position.
Something like this:
So start with this:
PRINT AT 11,16;"*"
Then
SCREEN$ is the reverse function to PRINT AT, and will tell you (within limits) what character is at a particular position on the screen. It uses line and column numbers in the same way as PRINT AT, but enclosed in brackets: for instance PRINT SCREEN$ (11,16) would print "*", which you could assign to a variable.
It allows for basic collision detection is BASIC.
Thanks