I'm afraid it still happens on intelbox (can't test on atibox now).
Since I've reported this issue here, I've learnt that what happens there is the following sequence of events:
You start the game
The monitor switches to full screen without any artifacts
The "flashing" takes place
The first into text displays
When the screen "flashes", it does not just show a white screen, but it actually displays a "random" screen which was previously displayed at some point after my last reboot for ~ half a second. When I tested today, the screen which "flashed" was an image of my Desktop, i.e. showing several folders on my XFCE4 desktop on top of my desktop background.
I just tested again, and this time I got to see this forum post I am just writing. Then I tried again, and there was no flash, and on yet another try I got the Desktop again. So this feels like it can be a mix of Mesa (which powers both systems I see this artifact on) and libvlc initialization issue.