Twilight Hack Update

Twilight Hack Update

February 12th, 2008, 19:11 Posted By: wraggster

Brakken over at tehskeen posted more details about the Twilight Hack released yesterday:

Team Twiizers has released the Twilight Hack for the Nintendo Wii. This exploit allows you to run custom code in Nintendo Wii mode. This exploit comes in the form of a signed Save Game for Zelda - The Twilight Princess. All you need to do to load it is copy over the Save Game to your SD Card, replace your old Zelda Save Data (if any) with the new one, run the game and then load the save.

Once loaded go talk to the closest person or just walk backwards next to you and the Beta Loader will appear with a nice penguin logo. It also detects if there is an SD Gecko or USB Gecko connected. So - that's all it does for now, but expect another release soon that will allow you to boot up your own code.

This exploit was based on the earlier non-released Zelda Exploit that would simply crash your Nintendo Wii. I took the time to talk with Segher one of the authors of the exploit for a more detailed look into the creation and release.

It of course involves a lot of technical details and some private information. If you're interested in the "public" technical information you should visit Wiibrew.org for more information.

It all started when the keys to decrypt and encrypt save game data for the Nintendo Wii were found. Once found this let the authors (Segher, Bushing and Tmbinc) mess around with the save game data. This lead to a bug found in Zelda - The Twilight Princess which would "crash" the game.

Once in it's "crashed" state they were able to run just a few bytes of code (which is covered in this news post). After this they were able to bump up the amount of a code they could run - enough to create a preliminary "demo" of sorts which is this exploit.

Due to the fact they know how to encrypt the save data and sign it this allows any Nintendo Wii user the ability to load the exploit and does not require the use a modchip.

The exploit, like mentioned above, can detect the presence of a SD Gecko or USB Gecko. If you have your USB Gecko attached it will also send some text to it, but that's about it.

Segher told me that they are working on a new version and some of the features that are up in the air are loading your own code from the SD Gecko and USB gecko, but the main way for loading your own code that they are working on is going to be either over USB and Wifi or simply from the built in SD Card slot in the Nintendo Wii.

This is a great moment in time for the Nintendo Wii homebrew scene. Soon we'll be able to launch our own homebrew thanks to Segher, Bushing and Tmbinc.

All very interesting