Is it necessary for a splash screen bitmap to use a transparent color and be drawn with transparency?
A1:
No. Although the splash screen bitmap in the Space Out 2 game does use a transparent color, this isn't necessary in all splash screen bitmaps. In fact, if you're creating a splash screen bitmap that fills the entire game screen, you probably wouldn't want to draw it with transparency. In Space Out 2, transparency makes sense because it allows the starry background to shine through between the letters , which is a nice effect.
Q2:
Is it possible to create a splash screen that consists of more than one image?
A2:
Yes, in fact this was done quite a lot in classic arcade games that not only needed to display a title for a game, but also provide instructions in a relatively small amount of screen space. The idea is to present the images as a simplified slide show, where they are displayed in succession after pausing a few seconds on each one. This is carried out programmatically by adding additional splash screen modes to a game so that you know which splash screen image should be displayed. In practice, this could be accomplished by using the existing _bSplash variable to determine whether any splash screen image is displayed, and then use an integer variable to keep track of which splash screen bitmap is displayed from an array of bitmaps. You would have to add some timing code to the GameCycle() function to flip between splash screen images after a brief delay, or allow the user to press a key to move between each.
