Twilight hack

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The "Twilight Hack" is the name given to the exploit found by Team Twiizers of Wiibrew.org in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess that permits homebrew developers and every day users to run unofficial Homebrew software from a Secure Digital card card inserted into the slot on the front of the Wii. Notably, this is the first way found to boot homebrew software without the use of hardware modifications to the Wii console.^[1]

This hack exploits a buffer overflow error caused by loading a specially crafted save file for Twilight Princess. The save file stores the name of the horse in the game (canonically "Epona"). This save file presents a name much longer than expected to the Twilight Princess game, which causes the Wii system to crash when it tries to load the horse's name. With this crash, the system is made to run a loader program (which was loaded by the game as part of the name) instead of the code of Twilight Princess, that then proceeds to load a program from the Wii's front SD card slot. Any program that is placed on the root of the SD card, with the file-name "boot.elf", will run.

Numerous applications have been written that can be run using this method. Because the hack loads an application through a glitch in Twilight Princess, the game must be loaded each time the user desires to run a homebrew application. Certain programs have been made to install custom Wii Menu channels, so that the applications can be run from the Wii Menu instead of the Twilight Hack.