I am working on a Family Basic V3 project and I can't figure out how do I have 2 separate custom backgrounds on my screens. Help!
Check PAGE 115 out in the manual (https://www.famicomworld.com/forum/index.php?topic=10276.msg143285#msg143285) (download "fambasv3_t.txt" from first post) and it tells you how to switch the "display screen" and the "active screen" using the new SCREEN command.
You can actually display the second screen in regular Family BASIC as well by poking the scroll registers (&H2005) (https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/PPU_scrolling) directly, but printing and BG drawing commands will only work on the first screen in that version, so you would have to poke the nametable directly. The BG tool is actually using the second screen to draw on.
So the VIEW command pastes the background made with BGTOOL from the second screen to the first screen. That means I can't have 2 separate screens made with BGTOOL, right?
Right, only the second screen can be edited using BGTOOL. It might help to use an emulator like Mesen with the PPU viewer open to get a sense of what goes on with the two screens as you use the BGTOOL/VIEW/SCREEN commands.
(https://i.imgur.com/zVQWIiF.png)
I see. Thank you.