The Nintendo Switch Lite is only 10 days away and it’s only appropriate that Nintendo released a firmware update to complement it. This time, Firmware 9.0.0 has been released for the Nintendo Switch and as usual, SciresM is already getting to work hacking it! On other news, the Yuzu folks also have some exciting news about Nintendo Switch emulation which we’ll also be looking at in this article.

Nintendo releases Switch FW 9.0.0 and SciresM already diffing it to port Atmosphere!

Some hours ago, firmware 9.0.0 for the Switch landed which broke compatibility with CFWs like Atmosphere and also brought along a new TrustZone revision.

Apparently, the issue with FE: Three Houses not opening might have pushed FW 9.0.0 release a bit forward. (Tweet)

As it’s an x.0.0 release, its changelog isn’t just ‘General system stability improvements’ and it actually brings about some new minor features including:

• In anticipation of the Switch Lite’s retail release, you can now turn on/off its built-in buttons
  • This can only be done if you have a wireless controller connected to your Switch Lite and it’s reset every restart or wake up from sleep mode
• An option to change the touch screen sensitivity has been added with two levels namely ‘Standard’ (i.e if you don’t use a stylus) and ‘Stylus’
  

  When a new firmware is released, SciresM always rolls up his sleeves and FW 9.0.0 is no exception as he dumped the new keys in just a few hours!

• Alarm notifications have been added to Settings->Notifications and they can only be set up within software that supports them
• Some minor features namely search functionality in the News Channel, the ability to display a QR code for checking in with your Nintendo Account and an ‘Online Play Invites’ section in the User page
• An issue in which Fire Emblem: Three Houses crashed on startup has been fixed

Obviously, you should not update to FW 9.0.0 if you care about your Nintendo Switch being hacked especially if it’s an ipatched unit on FW 7.0.1 or below as there’s a good amount of hope for these firmwares to be hacked in the not-so-far future. However, if your Switch is a fusee-gelee vulnerable unit then it probably won’t be long before you’ll be able to run Atmsophere on FW 9.0.0 as SciresM has already dumped the new keys that the update brings along and already identified the differences in TrustZone compared to FW 8.1.0 which Atmosphere supports.

Switch Emulation: Yuzu gets resolution upscaling in latest Patreon Preview release

During July and August, the Yuzu folks were pretty silent about their work but that certainly doesn’t mean that not much development went on during the summer. On the contrary, a lot of stuff has been achieved and this was described in a post published yesterday which contains the following highlights:

• Resolution Rescaler has been added which lets you render games at resolutions other than what they’re intended to run at
  

  You can now play Switch games at 4K or even higher resolutions with Yuzu… provided you have hardware that’s powerful enough! (Image from the post linked)

  • As a result, games that max out at 720/1080p can now be rendered at pretty high resolutions such as 6K which undoubtedly makes them look much better than they could ever look on real hardware!
  • Obviously, you need pretty capable hardware to get playable framerates at 4K resolution but as time goes on the emulator is becoming more optimised so there’s good news for the future
  • Like Cemu, this features makes use of resolution profiles which are either generated by playing the game or by downloading them
  • Some titles such as Super Mario Odyssey, Zelda BotW and Pokemon: Let’s Go currently have some minor non-breaking issues with the Resolution Rescaler
• Colour output (sRGB) has been improved which means that some games which looked lighter than they should now look fine
• The GPU buffer cache has been reworked to be faster and more accurate which led to graphical fixes in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and other titles
• Xenoblade 2 and Hyrule Warriors now look much better as many graphical issues have been cleared up

As hinted in this section’s heading, the above features are only available in the Patreon Preview Release so you have to donate at least $5/month to get the binaries legally. However, if you don’t wish to donate, the team behind Yuzu promise to add the Patreon-exclusive features to freely available Canary builds in the near future so that everyone could enjoy them!

Conclusion

For more reading up about emulation, you should surely check out RPCS3’s July 2019 progress report which was published yesterday in which the Gran Turismo games received a whole slew of fixes including a fix for the rainbow texture issue in Gran Turismo 6 among other improvements including microphone support.