Getting Atmosphère Ready for FW 21.0.0

I’ve barely touched my Switch and was running some old Atmosphère version and Firmware 19-something. As someone not that deep in that topic anymore, here are the steps I’ve needed to get it updated to FW 21 – ready for the latest and greatest games. (Mostly for my own reference in the future.)

Atmosphère

The first step is to update Atmosphère to a version that supports the desired FW version. At the time of writing this is the pre-release version 1.10.0 available from their GitHub page.

I’m using the AiO-Switch-Updater for that.

If the Switch complains about a mismatching Fusée version, make sure to download the latest fusee.bin from the Atmosphère GitHub page and put it on your RCM tool as well as in /bootloader/payloads/ on your SD card.

SigPatches

Just to be sure I’ve downloaded a recent set of SigPatches from this GBATemp post.

sys-patch

Get the latest version from their GitHub page and copy everything to your SD card.

Firmware Update

Now is a good time to use the AiO-Switch-Updater to update the emuNAND system to 21.0.0.

If Fusée is showing some error like Unable to identify package1, you were a bit too eager and the firmware version isn’t supported by the version of Atmosphère you have. Try to find a pre-release version or wait until a newer version gets released.
The other alternative is to recreate your emuNAND from scratch – but that only works if you didn’t update your sysNAND yet, of course.

Dumping Keys

My prod.keys was missing the latest keys, so I’ve dumped a fresh file using a recent version of Lockpick RCM.

Bonus: Convert XCI to NSP on macOS

To convert an XCI file to NSP, there’s the Switch Army Knife (SAK). However, this is a Windows-only app. For macOS, there’s a command line tool called 4NXCI. You can compile it by renaming the config.mk.template to just config.mk and then running make all. This creates a binary called 4nxci and you just have to copy your prod.keys into the same folder and rename it to keys.dat for it to start working.