As usual, SciresM made good on his promise 2 days ago to get Atmosphere running on FW 11.0.0 as soon as possible due to the firmware breaking support for the CFW. In this article, we’re going to look at the release of Atmosphere 0.16.0 which comes with support for the latest Switch firmware, improved support for Mariko units & more!

What is Atmosphere?

The Atmosphere CFW has effectively cemented its place as the go-to Switch CFW and for good reason as it’s free, open-source, has extremely good homebrew compatibility and works quite well!

If you’ve ever dabbled in the Switch hacking scene, then you’ll know that Atmosphere is more or less the de facto CFW for the Nintendo Switch as other options such as ReiNX have fizzled out with the future of SX OS being uncertain after the law came down on it. Like CFWs for other hacked consoles, Atmosphere lets you expand your Switch’s capabilities in quite a few ways by allowing you to:

• Run homebrew through hbl and hbmenu
• Install custom themes to personalise your console
• Use a variety of custom sysmodules (plugins) such as sys-clk allowing you to overclock your Switch and TriPlayer which lets you listen to music in background while playing games and whatnot
• Make use of emuMMC which lets you install a copy of the Switch’s firmware on a microSD card thus allowing you to leave your NAND (SysNAND) untainted
• Easily update your Switch’s firmware on your hacked partition using Daybreak among other stuff

What does Atmosphere 0.16.0 bring along?

As expected, SciresM has keeps on wishing everyone a happy June 15th with every Atmosphere update including Atmosphere 0.16.0 🙂

The primary reason why Atmosphere 0.16.0 was released is to add support for Firmware 11.0.0 which was released earlier this week but the update packs in some more stuff. Going through its change log, Atmosphere 0.16.0 brings along:

• Support for firmware 11.0.0 by updating various parts of the Atmosphere CFW
  • Any homebrew that uses the ‘usb:ds’ service will be broken on FW 11.0.0 and needs to be recompiled using the latest version of libnx
• The Switch v2 & Switch Lite are now better supported in Atmosphere but this support is still incomplete
  • The ‘boot’ sysmodule, Daybreak and boot0 protection/management logic now works properly on such units
  • There are still some issues when running Atmosphere on such units such as wake-from-sleep not working well
  • The only public way to run any form of hacked firmware on the Switch v2 & Lite is by installing a modchip namely the ill-fated SX Core or SX Lite which require soldering and have faced numerous legal challenges
• The ‘boot’ sysmodule was updated and support for configuring address space width in hbl was added
• Some other stuff including the fixing of minor issues in filesystem code and a bug that could cause NCM to abort on consoles that shipped with FW 3.0.x and weren’t updated

Conclusion

You may grab Atmosphere 0.16.0 by following the download link below. It is important to state that Atmosphere 0.16.0 is in a pre-release state meaning that the provided binaries may be updated if any major bugs are reported. As a result, if you desire a fully stable system, it is advisable to wait a few days before updating.

Atmosphere 0.16.0 download link: https://github.com/Atmosphere-NX/Atmosphere/releases

SciresM’s Twitter (further updates on Atmosphere-related development and more): https://twitter.com/SciresM