Thanks everyone for the logic tables and explanations of that stuff.

Yeah, the current way I'm doing the masking is to first have it overwrite a mask sprite, and then XOR the white parts in. Then to get rid of it, I XOR the white parts, XOR the mask, then rewrite the tile the character was standing on. Probably not the best way, but it works at a plenty fast enough speed for me.

And about animated sprites... Probably not. I've tried making animated versions of my character sprites, and it doesn't really work well... I'm not really good at the character sprites and everything. I'm better at the inanimate objects, the surrounding and crap. Speaking of which, I've been working on basically converting various RPGMaker sprites into 8x8 format. By hand. Oy, that is most definitely hard work. But hey, it'll give me a lot more stuff to work with, so that's good.

It's pretty simple, there's not much more to it than what Kevin explained, even though it seems like it should be more complex. Just scroll one layer of your background slower than another, to make it appear farther away. For an example of parallax in real-life, imagine you are traveling in a car along a road next to a mountain. Look at the side of the road, then look at the mountain. Notice how the mountain, which is further away, appears to move more slowly relative to you? This is because of perspective. So if you have a sidescroller, for instance (the Mario games for SNES provide a good example for this) look at how the ground on which your character walks scrolls much faster than the mountains or clouds in the background. To do this, just make the background scroll less pixels per game loop than the foreground.