collision detection!! :D

I got it! I looked up inch(), like you had commented. that lead me to something like mvinch() or something here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8066592/check-char-at-current-given-position-in-pdcurses-ncurses
I had to change collAbove and all those from pointers to normal characters. inch/mvinch is a 'chtype' so I type casted it to a char. seems to work!