What he's saying is that you can't achieve the same effects with background tiles. It would be possible, just use SPPAGE to make the sprites use BG tiles. It would be limited, though. You wouldn't be able to rotate it very easily.
Try using this
XSCREEN mode,number of sprites on top screen,number of bg layers on top screen
And only use the BG layers on the bottom screen.
For example, if you use
XSCREEN 2,256,2
Then you can only use BG layers 1 and 2 on the bottom screen, since layers 0 and 1 are for the top screen.
You defined your TEX array to be 8x8. That means you can't put numbers higher than 7 in there. Try changing line 95 to
T=(T+SLICE) MOD 8
Multiplying by 8 almost guarantees that T will be over 7.
You mean making the text appear above the sprites? You can do this by either putting the text at a lower z coordinate than the sprite using the LOCATE x,y,z command, or by putting the sprite at a higher z coordinate than the text using SPOFS id,x,y,z
Are you copying these by hand? There is an awesome piece of software that can transfer images and programs from a PC to SmileBASIC or vice versa. It works by encoding the data as sound.
You can get it here:
http://rei.to/petitmodem_en.html
Be sure the bps on both systems is the same.
I recommend selecting the ARQ method as Simplex makes errors.
You can put
IF BUTTON(0)==1 THEN PRINT "UP"
into your program, but it won't trigger when you press multiple buttons.
Because the number is binary, you can write
IF BUTTON(0) AND 1 THEN PRINT "UP"
and it will trigger even when you're pressing multiple buttons.
The number inside the parentheses is
0-pressed
1-moment pressed with repeat
2-moment pressed without repeat
3-moment released