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for some reason i can only read the hour and min from CMOS once and then i cant retrieve any data from those ports. why is this? i can read the DAY over and over again...

i don't see a particular reason for this ... maybe something wrong in your code, i know that the CMOS chip behaves a bit differently from the other component of the PC ...

yea i found the problem but im not sure why it occurs.
i change the number i get to ascii code.

char a=CHANGETOASCII(cmoshours&f); low
char b=CHANGETOASCII(cmoushours>>4) high

when i put the ascii codes in a pointer like:
char *temp;
temp[0]=a;
temp[1]=b;
temp[2]=0;
print(temp);
.....it doesnt work...nothing prints

so i have to do:
char temp[3];
temp[0]=a;
temp[1]=b;
temp[2]=0;

WHY DOES THIS HAPPEN?

Because you don't understand C strings. The first piece of code doesn't allocate any memory for the string. Your temp pointer points nowhere, so you're writing to a random memory address. In your second piece of code, you access temp as an array. The compiler allocates three elements for it, and everything works.

also remember the cmos timmer outputs BCD numbers which need to be converted.

BCD Numbers: a nibble of a byte represents a number? also known as packed numbers in mainframe asm?