For the last 2 weeks, the spotlight in the Nintendo Switch scene was mostly on its newly released Android port. Now, the hype has cooled down a bit and regular homebrew/CFW releases for the console have resumed. In this article, we’ll be looking at Atmosphère 0.9.3 which comes with faster boot times and the just-released vitaRTCW 0.2 update!

Switch Release: Atmosphère 0.9.3 with much faster boot times, automatic BIS key backups and more re-written system modules!

Atmosphère is a CFW for hackable Nintendo Switch consoles, which include fusee-gelee vulnerable units and ipatched units running FW 4.1.0 for now although support for Switch firmwares up to version 7.0.1 will almost certainly come in the future.

It’s June 15th again and this time, we have Atmosphere 0.9.3 which is the 21st official release of the CFW! (Tweet)

Similar to other CFWs, Atmosphère lets you do a wide variety of things on your Switch including running homebrew games/utilities, using custom modules (similar to plugins in PSP/PSVita jargon), overclocking your console and even running a secondary version of Horizon OS stored on your SDCard via emuMMC.

Other than being quite feature-packed, this CFW is also frequently updated and a few hours ago, Atmosphère 0.9.3 landed with:

• Significant optimisations, by hexkyz, to fusee’s boot sequence which means that Atmosphère’s boot times have been greatly reduced and you’ll be spending less time staring at its splash screen!
• Automatic backing up of your Switch’s BIS keys which are instrumental in fixing a corrupted NAND especially on ipatched units since they don’t have the RCM bug
• The “pm” (Process Manager), “creport” (Crash Report) and “fatal” system modules were rewritten with numerous improvements
• The version string in the Settings App now displays whether you’re using emuMMC or not and defaults pertaining to hbloader’s memory usage in applet mode were added to ‘system_settings.ini’
• The bundled version of hbl has been updated to version 2.2 (from 2.1) and hbmenu got updated to version 3.1 (from 3.0.1)
• Other fixes and minor updates which can be found by browsing through its commit history

To grab Atmosphère 0.9.3, check out this link and make sure you update fusee-primary when installing it.

PSVita Release: vitaRTCW 0.2 with fixed Cinematics, multiplayer and numerous fixes!

It’s no secret that the PSVita’s FPS library is pretty thin and with a few exceptions such as Killzone Mercenary, not all that good.

vitaRTCW 0.2 comes with multiplayer support for extra enjoyment! (Image Source)

To remedy that, various homebrew developers ported classics such as DOOM, Quake and numerous others including Return To Castle Wolfenstein, the port of which was updated earlier today. This sizeable update, which bumps the version number to 0.2, brings along:

• Multiplayer support which lets you play RTCW online on the few populated servers that remain!
  • Make sure to play the single player game first since it’s awesome in its own right 😉
• Cinematics are now rendered properly so you can enjoy the fictional plot with Nazis dabbling in the supernatural a bit better
• The memory available to the renderer was increased and memory usage for both it and the sound manager was reduced
• Mipmaps can now be used and support for fog/portals got implemented
• Numerous rendering issues were fixed including one that made the skybox not render properly in some instances

To download vitaRTCW 0.2 and nuke some Nazis, check out this link to get the port’s executables; the full changelog can be viewed here. You may donate to Rinnegatamante (the developer behind vitaRTCW) via his Patreon.

It’s important to note that you must supply Return To Castle Wolfenstein’s game files yourself as the game isn’t free!

Conclusion

If you want to check out more stuff relating to these two scenes, make sure to read about the bounty for native resolution PSP games on the Vita (which saw its value increase from $75 to $420 following the linked article) and the release of Goldleaf 0.6.1 which can handle files larger than 4GB properly by the USB system. On another note, RetroArch yesterday published a blog post about an upcoming text-to-speech feature for emulated games and the Yuzu folks released another Dev Interview which provides an interesting read if you have a couple of minutes to spare!