Looking for a beta reader

It has been a while since I've posted to this forum, Real Life[1] has severely limited my free time.

After completing 12 games in 12 months, I'm going to be spending all my development time on UnTech, my Super Nintendo game engine.

In order to help motivation I have also decided to write a small blog about the process.

However, looking back on last night's entry, it appears I need a beta reader. I've already cleaned it up a bit but still doesn't feel right to me. It's been years since I had to write something that wasn't an email or dot points and it shows.

I'm wondering if any of you are willing to read though my drafts and give me advice on my writings before I post them. I'm trying to aim for one post every week, but knowing me it would probably be every fortnight.

I will appreciate any help with my writings. If no-one responds I'll just post them bare and hope I get better with experience.

[1] Real Life: Destroyer of personal projects since 1988.

I'd be happy to beta-read your stuff. Though I'm not a native speaker of English, I do feel confident using the language, especially since I spent two semesters studying languages at UoA several years ago.

I'll send you a PM with my contact details.

I have very little free time as well, but I'll try to help out with the page you linked.

Your sentences are really clipped. Going for the Hemingway approach, I see. Starting an independent clause with 'But', etc. might bother some editors.

So here goes:

"Especially when creating..." ought to be joined with the sentence before it. You have a dependent clause there, and starting it with an adverb isn't helping matters.

"...player tileset to VRAM if were only uses a small part of it." I guess you mean "to VRAM if it were to use only a small..."?

"In order for sprites to be larger or to have more animation frames." You have a purpose but no action. Do you mean maybe "...more animation frames, you will need to reduce..."

"...enemies can be in a level..." -> "enemies that can be..."

"NOTE: This VRAM map is sanitised / garbage tiles have been removed." You ought to make both verbs passive & present perfect (has been sanitised), put a period after 'sanitised', and capitalize 'Garbage'. Or if you put a colon after 'sanitised', you don't need to capitalize 'Garbage'.

"NTSC SNES4 Games with" needs a period before 'Games'.

"...cases where the DMA buffer is always fill..." -> full

"...and an entity will never have their frame changed." -> "...never have its frame..." It's a thing. Don't worry about gender bias.

"animations of entity’s 0-3..." -> entities

"...a hard limit the FPS on the animations..." -> "...a hard limit on the FPS of (the) animations..."

"...which entities failed their animations failed..." I guess you could remove the 2nd 'failed'.

"...a reference counted allocation table..." x2 -> "...reference-counted...", I suppose (though you might mean something different).

"double linked" -> "doubly-linked" or "double-linked" if you want.

"...tilesets could change at anytime." -> "...change at any time." OR "...change anytime." (though a snob would sniff at the latter.)

"...knowing it is only owned by only one entity." Remove the 1st 'only'.

"...figured out how to I should solve..." -> "how to solve" OR "how I should solve"

Thankyou for your effort. I knew there was something wrong, but could never figure out what it was.

The blog post has been updated.



Thanks for agreeing to help me with this. I just need someone to point at my work and tell me where I'm going wrong so I can learn to do better next time.

The blog will mostly cover the design decisions and internals of my game engine. I'm hoping it helps future SNES homebrewers with their projects in the future.

I'm glad you're doing a blog. I look forward to reading more, and seeing some SNES homebrews. Good Luck!

A couple more:

"This does place a hard limit on the frame-rate of the animations (...), with the limited ROM space a SNES cart offers, this is not a real problem."

"Upon the start of the next display frame; they will be processed first and then the game loop resumes as normal."

Switch the semicolon in the 2nd quote with the comma after the parentheses of the 1st quote, and karma will be restored.

"...VBlank on an NTSC SNES4, games..." Sorry again, but a comma is incorrect. It needs to be a period or a semicolon.

Sigh fixed.


The rules of English punctuation are weird.

Well, a semicolon and colon are basically like periods (when not in a list).

The examples:

While I do like sushi.
When you see the picture.
Upon the start of the next display frame.

etc. are all incorrect/faulty grammar since the first word in all of them (conjunction / adverb) makes them dependent clauses; they need to be joined with independent clauses through a comma. The last, erm... familiar, example doesn't even contain a verb, so it couldn't possibly stand on its own.

Thanks, I'm going to head over the library and see if they have a primer on English punctuation and grammar.

Hopefully that will clear things up.

Are you thinking of adding a "half row of sprites" option in the future? I'm not saying you need to, I just find it strange you can't have a 32x32 sprite without having to have another, but I understand if you don't want it to be overly complicated, at least for now.

The main reason I didn't was to ensure that fragmentation was not possible.

I thought about having a dedicated segment for half-rows to prevent fragmentation. After playing around with pen and paper I decided that it wasn't worth the reduction in the number of full row slots.

In the future I may expand the vram engine to include a fixed-dynamic hybrid. It would consist of a vram row where the left half is dynamic and the right half is fixed. The fixed tiles would be for common tiles for the frameset (enemy head, shield, etc) and only the changed tiles will be uploaded during VBlank. I'm not sure if the reduction in DMA is worth the development time until I have some actual sprite sheets.