Fabio's ads1256 is working well for me. Thank you.
Has anyone (Fabio?) done the same for the DAC8532 chip? I'm struggling and everything I have found is in C. I'd like to write something in python to access the 2 digital channels.

Fixed it myself with the help of my genius son. Here's how I 'broke' it. Tried to test the wifi from my pc using Tera Term. One of the options in 'file' is 'send a file'. Tried to send a jpg file and just got a big mess on screen. Turns out the big mess on screen was saved as a bunch of garbage file...

My Pi3 is new to me and was doing some setups of Bluetooth and Wifi.
After setting it up as a wifi hotspot, many (not all) filenames are garbage characters. Same in console mode (tree or ls commands for example) and gui file manager.
Under settings, locale, GB (Great Britian) and UTF-8