The original Gamerz Xtreme Intro was written in 2016 for the Twitch channel of the same name and, after a request on Twitter a couple of months back from the channel’s owner and a little work from myself and aNdy, there’s now a second intro which hopefully turned up just in time for a planned channel refresh and transition to Mixer. This new intro is the rather imaginatively titled Gamerz Xtreme Intro 2 and it has everything you could want from an intro; lots of moving raster bars, bouncing multicolour bitmap logos with wave effects, a sideborder ROL scroller and some great music.

As with the previous intro, this was provided to Psycho Stick in source code form including the relevant tools to build it and a configuration file. The latter is basically an assembler include containing all of the bits which can be edited to change the scrolling message text and tweak it’s colours or select one of the pre-made raster effects for the main part of the screen. Once that file has been modified and saved, a supplied batch file can be triggered which assembles the code and crunches it down ready for use.

Getting this done was a lot of fun and one piece of “overkill coding” only becomes visible when the “debug borders” option is enabled in VICE, all of the colour splits in the main effect area are lined up to the same cycle for the entire height of the screen… that took far too much effort to get right, especially considering it’s completely hidden from view and nobody would’ve even noticed either way had I not drawn attention to them!