Atmosphère 1.7.0 and Hekate 6.1.1 released, add support for Nintendo Switch Firmware 18.0.0

Switch devs SciresM, and CTCaer  have released updates for Atmosphère, and Hekate/Nyx respectively. This follows the recent release of Firmware 18.0.0 for the Nintendo Switch, and, as expected, the popular scene tools bring 18.0.0 support with their updates. As often, this fresh release of Atmosphère is a pre-release, meaning we can expect a minor update in the days to come, that could iron out some bugs. With that being said, in my experience, all Hekate/Atmosphère releases are top quality and I’d have no concerns installing a pre-release from SciresM.

What are Atmosphère / Hekate for Nintendo Switch ?

Hekate is a bootloader for Nintendo Switch, and more general “swiss army knife” payload for any hackable Switch. Atmosphère is the most complete and used Custom Firmware on the Nintendo Switch. The combination of these two tools constitutes in my opinion the basics of hacking your Switch.

Lockpick_RCM lets you decrypt and export your Switch’s keys for use in various critical homebrew tools (such as hactool, hactoolnet/LibHac, ChoiDujour, etc…).

Atmosphère 1.7.0 update

Atmosphère 1.7.0  brings the following changes (from the official changelog)

• Basic support was added for 18.0.0.
  • The console should boot and atmosphère should be fully functional. However, not all modules have been fully updated to reflect the latest changes.
    • There shouldn’t be anything user visible resulting from this, but it will be addressed in a future atmosphère update, once I am not traveling so much.
  • exosphère was updated to reflect the latest official secure monitor behavior.
  • mesosphère was updated to reflect the latest official kernel behavior.
  • spl was updated to reflect the latest official behavior.
• fusee no longer supports applying IPS patches to KIPs.
  • The only KIPs that are ever present are a) atmosphère modules, b) custom system modules, or c) FS.
  • The IPS subsystem was originally designed to make nogc patches work for FS, but these are now internal, and it appears the literal only kip patches that exist are for piracy.
    • I could not find any kip patches posted anywhere made for any other purpose.
  • It fundamentally does not make sense to slow down boot for every normal user for a feature that has no actual use-case, especially when fusee seeks to be a minimal bootloader.
• Minor improvements were made to atmosphere’s gdbstub, including:
  • Support was added for QStartNoAckMode.
  • An issue was fixed that could cause a fatal error when creating too many breakpoints.
• A number of minor issues were fixed and improvements were made, including:
  • pt-BR (PortugueseBr) is now accepted as a valid language when overriding game locales.
  • A bug was fixed that could cause atmosphere to incorrectly serialize output object IDs over IPC when using domain objects.
  • A bug was fixed in pm‘s resource limit boost logic that could potentially cause legitimate boosts to fail in certain circumstances.
  • loader/ro will now throw a fatal error when using invalid IPS patches that go out of bounds, instead of corrupting memory.
  • Support was fixed for booting using a memory configuration of half of the true available memory (e.g. forcing a 4GB configuration on an 8GB board).
• General system stability improvements to enhance the user’s experience.

Hekate 6.1.1 / Nyx 1.6.1 update

Hekate 6.1.1:

• HOS 18.0.0 support
• Failed Stock booting because of pkg1 issues will now reboot to OFW if conditions are met (T210B01 or no autorcm for T210)
• Fixed an issue with clearing system counters
• L4T and ARC changes:
  • Advanced ram timings config (ram oc opt) is now finalized (check the helper site for the new %)
  • Fixed an issue with ram bank priorities (increases performance 1-5%, depends on usage range)
  • Adjusted scaling for SDMMC1 and DDR200
  • T210: Frequencies passed changed from 204/408/666/800/1600/OC to 204/408/800/1333/1600/OC

Nyx v1.6.1

• • HOS 18.0.0 support
  • Add 6.2″ OEM display clone ID
  • Add details to imu cal error (if eMMC/prodinfo is mangled)

Download Atmosphère & Hekate

• You can download Atmosphère 1.7.0 here.
• You can download Hekate/Nyx here.

sources: SciresM, CTCaer