A pair of new quality-of-life patches – one for the Crime Patrol prototype and the other for Policenauts – were released on SegaXtreme earlier this week by romhacker privateye.
Click here for the Crime Patrol patch and click here for the Policenauts patch.
It is done. This pair of patches marks the 7th and final batch of privateye’s quality-of-life patch for every Saturn title with light-gun compatibility. This ambitious project began with the Virtual Cop games back in February of this year and the subsequent releases have been a reliable fixture of 2026. We would be hard pressed to think of a clearer testament to privateye’s passion for the Sega Saturn. You can find out the full story for each batch in these SHIRO! articles – batch 1, batch 2, batch 3, batch 4, batch 5, and batch 6.
These patches – like those of the previous bundles – give players the option to remove the “flash” that appears when triggered by the controller. These screen “flashes” are necessary for hit detection when playing on CRT televisions, but are unneeded for most modern solutions, such as those enabled via FPGA emulators – MiSTer or SuperStation One – with LCD compatible light-guns – i.e., GC01, GUN4IR, and Sinden.
The Crime Patrol patch simply removes the blue flashes in the game. In the announcement post, privateye thanks sega-saturn.net for dumping the unreleased Crime Patrol prototype for Saturn-fans to enjoy.
“It took me all of ten minutes to disable the flash in Crime Patrol” – Privateye
The Policenauts patch gives the option to remove the white flashes triggered by light-guns during the shooting segments of the game, but it also:
- Disables the white flash triggered by controller/mouse in shooting scenes.
- Disables the white flash in Dave, Meryl, and Redwood’s cutscenes at the shooting range.
This patch was a whole other can of worms as shared by privateye on Bluesky,
“Policenauts was an absolute beast!”
We encourage you to read privateye’s lengthy thread on this proverbial odyssey to patch Policenauts – the start of the tale shared below –but, spoilers, it involved the addition of some “small” ASM routines, among other things. Check it out.
Privateye thanks café-alpha (of Pseudo Saturn Kai fame), VGF/IlDucci/Tío Víctor, and Snake128 for making the Policenauts patch possible.
Crime Patrol began life as an interactive LazerDisc title, developed and released by American Lazer Games in May 1993. This shooting gallery-style game sees the player stopping bank robbers, thugs, and hijackers in glorious B-movie quality FMV. Crime Patrol was ported to numerous home consoles and computers, including the Sega CD in 1994, but the planned Saturn release, set for December of 1996, was ultimately shelved. A prototype for the game, labeled 25 September 1996, was dumped by A Murder of Crows and released to the public in November 2017.
Policenauts is an adventure game – and spiritual successor to Snatcher – that needs little introduction these days. It was directed by Hideo Kojima and released by Konami exclusively in Japan in 1996. Policenauts received a fan translation in November of 2016 thanks to a team operating out of JunkerHQ.
For more on Policenauts, why not check out Peter Malek’s thoughts in these two #BestOfSaturns – click here for the 2022 coverage, and here for the 2026 update.
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