Saturn fans can now enjoy the light-gun classics Area 51 and Maximum Force free of unnecessary bright screen flashes courtesy of SHIRO! community member privateye.
He uploaded patches Saturday to SegaXtreme. The Area 51 patch can be downloaded here and the Maximum Force patch can be downloaded here.
These two improvement patches work exactly as advertised: they remove the “flash” — colored blue in Area 51 and white in Maximum Force — that appear when triggered by the controller. As noted in privateye’s announcement on social media, these screen flashes are unnecessary for play via FPGA emulators like MiSTer or SuperStation One when using LCD-compatible light-guns like GC01, GUN4IR, and Sinden.
The flashes are also unnecessary when playing with a software emulator like Mednafen or Ymir.
This duo of flash removal patches follows a trend of light-gun quality-of-life patches released by privateye this year. Check out SHIRO!’s coverage of privateye’s patches for light-gun games Virtua Cop, Virtua Cop 2 and House of the Dead here.
Mesa Logic developed Area 51 for arcades in 1995. The game proved to be a somewhat unexpected hit, especially given a reportedly mixed critical reception. This success prompted ports to home consoles by Midway Home Entertainment the following year. Maximum Force was a successor project, also by Mesa Logic, building off the popularity of Area 51. In fact, Maximum Force utilizes the same arcade board as Area 51. Maximum Force released first in arcades in 1997 and received a Saturn home conversation the same year, again published by Midway Home Entertainment.
i’ll be putting these to good use with my MiSTer/gun4ir setup