It's "Short" in BlitzMax and I just remembered seeing an old c++ code where we used DWORD buffers, because we generated floating point colors, floats being a double word (32 bit). Then in all my joy and euphoria I didn't think much, writing the happy post, haha!
...thanks, though, I still feel like a fool more often than not.
But what REALLY puzzles me, still, is why RGBA16F isn't keeping the information of the 16bit word or even floats themselves, if you draw the texture into a 32F buffer, but if you put the exact same data directly into a 32F buffer is all is well?! Somehow strange to me?!
There are still quite a few "magical" things to me left to discover.