Every time that a new version of Atmosphère is released, SciresM does a tweet wishing everyone a happy “June 15th” even though the day is different. However, this time, the greeting actually holds as Atmosphère 0.9.0 was released on June 15th (at least in some time zones) and it brings a highly awaited feature!

What is Atmosphère?

With Atmosphère, you can do a lot of cool stuff like playing DOOM 3 and various other homebrew game ports 😉

Atmosphère is a Custom Firmware (CFW) for Fusée Gelée vulnerable Nintendo Switch consoles which are those consoles produced earlier on in the system’s life span (you can learn more about which consoles are vulnerable by following this link). This CFW, which is primarily developed by SciresM, TuxSH, hexkyz, and fincs with contributions from other developers, can do a wide range of things to make your Switch more useful including:

• Giving you the ability to run a lot of homebrew games, emulators and utilities
  • Some notable homebrew are pPlay (a sophisticated video player by Cpasjuste), Reicast (semi-working Dreamcast emulator on the Switch) and DOOM 3
• Lets you use sys-clk to overclock your console for better performance in games and emulators
• The ability to use custom themes to make your Switch look nicer
• Commercial game modding, support for installing modules (similar to plugins) and many other features

What does Atmosphère 0.9.0 bring along?

Atmosphère 0.9.0 is considered a major update that comes with one main feature namely emuNAND. The full list of changes includes:

• Support for redirecting the NAND to the SDCard (emuMMC) – with significant contributions from @m4xw and @CTCaer
  • In layman’s terms, emuMMC is a feature similar to emuNAND that allows you to have another instance of the Switch’s operating system (Horizon OS) installed on your microSD card that is completely separate from SysNAND (the Switch’s internal NAND flash storage).
    

    Fancy keeping an old version of Horizon OS while also being able to play the newest games? With emuMMC, you can do exactly that and more!

  • This other instance can be a version of your choice which means that your SysNAND can be on FW 8.0.0 while your emuNAND can be on FW 6.2.0 if you require that version for homebrew compatibility or what not.
  • Other than allowing you to install another FW version, emuMMC is much safer when it comes to online play since you can leave your SysNAND effectively untouched and clean for online gaming.
  • To use emuMMC follow the instructions about paths and configuration provided in the changelog
  • The current emuMMC is currently considered beta/experimental so if you’re a regular user without much insight into how the Switch works, it’s recommended you wait for Atmosphère 0.9.1 which will certainly be released soon as a bug fix update
• The output of creport, the Switch’s crash reporting module, has been improved in order to simplify debugging
• The Cheat VM by dmnt was extended to allow for a new debug opcode
• Some minor improvements, which can be found in the commit history, and bug fixes

While Atmosphère 0.9.0 is a pretty major update, it’s recommended you wait a bit until Atmosphère 0.9.1 is released unless you’re an experienced user. However, if you think you know what you’re doing, simply follow the link below to grab the binary files and see the full changelog!

Conclusion

On a concluding, it’s important to note that emuMMC won’t make you magically immune to being banned since you can still be banned if you do stupid things like going online with backups even if you’re using the instance of Horizon OS found on your microSD card. However, if you know what you’re doing, emuMMC lets you do your hacking needs in a safer environment which is why it should be used.

Furthermore, it might be a good idea to wait for a guide on how to properly use emuMMC if you don’t want to experiment yourself 🙂

Atmosphère 0.9.0 download link + changelog: https://github.com/Atmosphere-NX/Atmosphere/releases/

This time around, it really is June 15th 😉