Problem with fstream::read

[aviraldg]

I'm having a problem with read , my code is somewhat like:

char chipMemory [chipMemorySize]; // ~35XX
fstream ifile;
ifile.open(argv[1],ios::in|ios::binary|ios::nocreate|ios::ate);
int fileLength=ifile.tellg();
ifile.seekg(ios::beg);
ifile.read(chipMemory,fileLength);
ifile.close();

After the last function call in the program, (Note , this is an extract , and seemingly irrelevant pieces have been removed)
(short) chipMemory[0] "prints as" (printf used) 0xFFFFFFE0
(short chipMemory[2] "prints as" 0xFFFFFFEE
it should contain:
(short) chipMemory[0] == 0x00E0;
(short) chipMemory[2] == 0x00EE;
What I'm most puzzled about is that a short is 2 bytes , so the maximum short would be 0xFFFF , not even close to 0xFFFFFFE0.
I'm guessing this is because the file starts with a nul (0x00) , which is supposed
to mark the end of a file.
(Note : I'm not checking for nul in any way at all)

[jabbah]

Im not prefectly sure but could it be that 0x00E0 overflows char? should you be using unsigned char?

printf("%d\n", 0x00E0 );
char c = 0x00E0;
printf("%d\n", c);
printf("0x%x\n", c);
printf("0x%x\n", (short)c);