Honestly, I don´t really get the gen-stuff as well. There definately could be a better documentation. But there are so many amazing patches and examples floating around, that can be investigated to learn - I just need to invest some more time, I guess.
From OSCII´s original patch I learned that [* ] and [+]/[- ] accept to numers as argument. In this case the first will affect the X- the second the Y-coordinates. The [* ] will scale the image, the [+ ]/[- ] results in offset. We need to scale down the image, since we can´t just split it in the middle if we wan´t some overlap.
I can´t really explain the underlaying vector-maths, but eventually someone might drop in to bring some light into this...
good luck,
j