RetroAxis

I have been working on this problem for the past few days trying to find a solution. The previous method of exposing the BIOS password was removed in the BIOS itself. The new .20 update actually removed the EFI Variable SystemSupervisorPW which was storing the password in cleartext. While a new variable showed up called AdminPassword it does not have readable data, despite trying several attack vectors to retrieve something from it. My next attempt to unlock the system was to try and unlock the BIOS itself. Atari has locked it down at the BIOS level using an EFI feature called SMM (I think?). I have experimented with trying to disable SecureBoot and other settings from UEFI Shell, with no success. Each attempt to write to a variable results in a fail, which means the variables are all Read Only or being blocked by the BIOS itself. SO without the password, I don't think there is anything more we can do. I for one find this to be complete B.S. as the whole point of "PC MODE" is to install an alternative OS. But now, it is ONLY an OS that has SecureBoot capability. This eliminates systems like Lakka or Batocera and others that have not signed or shimed their kernels and bootloaders. Anyone else tried anything with different results?

As mentioned, I have KVM/Qemu on Linux running on the VCS after enabling SVM in the BIOS. I have been able to run multiple Linux VM's successfully. I am currently testing running the VCSOS as a VM on the VCS, more on this later.

The password was not actually stored on the filesystem, as I checked /dev/mmcblk0p1 p2 and p3, which are the 3 EFI partitions from the factory. I received a tip that it was stored within the EFI Bios itself. I remembered from SPARC and PPC they had a command line interface to the OpenFirmware that let you perform get and set operations on the parameters. There are EFI Tools available for Linux and using these, I was able to locate the password. In theory, this would still work even if Atari changes the PW in a future update unless they start to encrypt the string in the BIOS. So for now, no need to fry your motherboards.

Here is how I found the password https://content.retroaxis.tv/episodes/022/ RetroAxis