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 everyday users to run unofficial homebrew software from a Secure Digital 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]
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The hack exploits a buffer overflow error caused by loading a specially crafted save file for Twilight Princess. "Twilight Princess" save files store the name of the player's horse in the game (originally "Epona"). The save file used by the hack presents a name much longer than expected to the Twilight Princess game. As a result, the excess characters in the horse's name overwrite a portion of the game's program in memory with a special loader program. This causes the "Twilight Princess" program to crash as it runs the loader program. When the loader program runs, any program that is placed in the root directory of the SD card, with the filename "boot.elf" or "boot.dol", will run.
Numerous applications have been written that can be run using this method. Since the hack loads an application through a glitch in Twilight Princess, in the past the game had to be loaded each time the user wished to run a homebrew application. This is no longer the case. Certain programs have been made to install custom Wii Menu channels such as the Homebrew Channel so that the applications can be run from the Wii Menu instead of through the Twilight hack every time.
On June 16, 2008, Nintendo released Wii Menu update 3.3 which automatically deletes and prevents the further storage of the unauthorized save files.[2] However, within six hours of the update's release, community members found two bugs in the update that in conjunction can allow a slightly modified Twilight Hack to operate and have released a new version of the hack that will work on machines that have updated to 3.3[3]. A release for 3.4 firmware was later released for the general public to be able to run the Twilight Hack, even though each time the Wii boots it will delete the 'hacked' savefile from the system memory. However, this doesn't prevent users from copying the file from the SD card to the system memory back each time the Wii is turned on and running the exploit without restarting the system first.
System Menu 4.0 blocks any current version of the hack from being copied.[4][5] Similar Smash Stack exploits exist in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures, and Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's: Wheelie Breakers that continue to work with all System Menu versions from 3.0 to 4.3, current as of December 13, 2010.