It may be helpful to read the "New Commands and Features" documentation here:
https://gitlab.com/thesmog358/tbblue/-/ ... s/nextzxos
Sprite commands start on page 7 and there's something about automatic sprite movement on page 9. This document applies to the very latest NextZXOS 2.7 which is available on that site for download.
The best place to discuss how these things work is probably on the Next Basic facebook group:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/232541547272192
Unfortunately it's facebook and it's private but one can't get away from the fact there is a lot of activity there.
For examples, the basic games by kevman3d on
itch.io are a really good source. He's spent his time to document how the games work in some associated pdfs.
The copper is a topic of its own. There is not any direct support in basic for it but it also doesn't need any -- you can easily program it from basic with REG commands. The copper is a very simple co-processor that is synchronized with the display. It only understands a handful of instructions -- wait for a position on the screen, write a value to a nextreg, stop. The key is the writing of a value to nextreg.
Here's a description of the nextreg:
https://gitlab.com/SpectrumNext/ZX_Spec ... extreg.txt
The nextreg is a field of bytes that control the Next's hardware so using the copper requires some understanding of how the hardware works. For example, you can hardware scroll the ula screen by pixel amounts horizontally by writing values to
nextreg 38. If you enter "REG 38,10" from basic, your ula screen will be scrolled over by 10 pixels.
In the context of the copper, you can get the copper to scroll the ula using this register at specific points in the display to create effects that require no intervention from the z80 or your basic program. I see some have started a thread here about it and in the facebook group above, matt has done some truly amazing stuff from basic with copper tricks, including smoothly scrolling 3d tunnel.
For tiles, nextbasic does not support the hardware tilemap yet. It does have the concept of tiles for layer 2 however, which is really plotting squares onto the layer 2 pixel bitmap. Info on that is also in the document above.