Radwar 2000

Radwar 2000 (Aka Radwar or Radwar 2k) is a Nintendo 64 homebrew demo released on 8 May 2000 by Ayatollah. It’s an invitation to the Radwar 2000 party, used as an advertisement to get people to attend.

You can download the file here by using the password “radwarbyayatollah”.

Radwar (the team)

Radwar is a group of German developers who cracked commodore 64 games that started back in 1984. The group was eventually named Radwar, being a contraction of “Radiological Warfare” and was founded by MWS, BKA, AVH, FLASH and DUKE. They eventually renamed to Radwar Enterprises 1941.

It was pretty much a group of people who hacked games and made demos of their own in a similar way to Dextrose and the people who worked in the N64 scene.

They still have their website running here.

Radwar 2000 (the party)

Every few years since its founding, they hosted parties together. I’m not entirely sure of the purpose or meaning behind them, but I suppose that it’s just a sort of class reunion that’s done every few years.

Radwar 2000 was the 9th of such parties, subtitled “The Ultimate Bug Event”. It took place on Saturday 27th May 2000 at Discotheque Las Palmas in Heisberg, Germany.

There was a demo competition, first place was won by Haujobb vs. Galadox, second by Farb-rausch and third was Witchcraft.

An eye witness had this to say about the event. Full post here.

Looking at the RADWAR 2000, where the organizers expected about 2000 visitors, just about 500 party-people found their way to the party place in Heinsberg near the German/Dutch border. This disappointing number was yet strengthened by the fact that the main party hall was mostly half-empty, creating the feeling of a small party. Most of the guests came from Germany itself, making so many famous European sceners miss a lot. Especially the Amiga scene was not represented in the way it should be, mainly because it consisted of the “new”, noisy scene generation instead of oldskool members from really legendary groups. Well, noise was produced due to the boozing which was allowed as always, and a good buffet meal was installed for free for all guests.

When all those live music-acts and go-go-girls attractions were to be watched at the show stage, one was still missing the demo competition a bit, which was cancelled due to a too small number of competitors and moved to the Evoke Party in Langerwehe, Germany, in August 2000.

RADWAR 2000 did not turn out to be the big success we all expected. It was a very well organized party with an unexplainable mysterious atmosphere which split the visitors into two sections, one loving the event, the other hating it. As myself is standing between these two groups, I hope that the statement of MWS and ARND won’t become true. They told us: “This time it will be the last time.” But on the other side, they told this after each RADWAR party – so “never say never” …

Dire of Darkage

They continued running Radwar parties ever since, the last one (as of publishing this article) having taken place in April 2017, three years ago.

Radwar 2000 (the demo)

MWS asked me to do something for the radwar Party and since RADWAR seems to be the only Party not forgetting the good old N64 i decided to sit down and put a small little something together. So here is the result. There is neither sound nor scroller so don’t expect too much. But I have included the Source Code for all those who might still be interessted in this nice little machine!!!

The source compiles fine under N64 Dev Kit 5.0 on a Silicon Graphix Indy R5000. No Dev Hardware was used but I decided to shoot for the gspF3DEX2 Microcode which is a little faster than the gspF3DEX. One final Demo will be put together by us in TRSI for this summer so look out for it. It’s a shame that there ain’t no POM this year. The scene has gone way down. Sad to see !!

Ayatollah – TrSi

Radwar 2000 is kind of hard to classify, it’s kind of like a bitmap/marquee but it has no bitmap and no marquee.

Instead, it has a black background with some text on its border reading:

  • 05/27/00 – Heinsberg (Date and time of the Radwar 2000 party)
  • Radwar Party 2K

In the middle, there’s a spinning block that reads “Radwar” on two sides and “TRSI” on the other two. Strangely, this rotating block is missing two sides, so it’s hollow in the middle.

The bottom part is the most interesting. There’s a scrolling set of images, similar to a Star Wars opening crawl. It’s not very clear as to what they say since the resolution is so low, but I’ll try to make out what I can. So, from beginning to end, and left to right:

  • Hotline
  • The lightforce
  • Triad
  • The Austria Crew
  • Something
  • Strike force
  • Radwar Enterprise Presents
  • Scoop designs proudly presents
  • DCS
  • AFL
  • Science 4SI
  • Genesis
  • (Eagle picture)
  • Light Circle
  • 2000 AD co-patch
  • SCC
  • Papillons
  • Radwar (helicopter)
  • Fairlight
  • Ikari

These all seem to be demos or the title screens of cracks that Radwar has worked on in the past. It’s nice to see this demo paying homage to the work they’ve done in the past.

Radwar themselves haven’t really worked on the Nintendo 64, but the competitions they hold are meant to be platform-independent. You can make a submission as long as it’s original.

Source code

This is one of those N64 homebrew demos that come with the code that was used to make it.

The strangest thing about this source code that makes it unlike the other homebrews of its era is that it was made using the N64 SDK. It has the makefile, spec file, textures made using rgb2c… Everything really.

I’m not going to delve into it too much, but it can be used as a starting point or guide for a project you might want to work on.

Conclusion

Radwar 2000 is one of those demos that I thought was going to be an easy write, but I ended up going down the rabbit hole a bit. At first, I thought that an ‘invitation to the party’ meant that they were inviting people to a ‘party’ as in a group of people like a political party or an RPG party. I never really thought it was going to be a real party with live music and 500 people, that’s just insane.

The documentation and source code by Ayatollah is great to look through, and could be a source of inspiration for many to come.

It would be nice if the 2017 Radwar wasn’t the last one. I probably wouldn’t go since I don’t have much to show for it, but it’s amazing that the tradition has endured 30 years.

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Radwar 2000 is a Nintendo 64 homebrew demo that served as an invation or advertisement to attend a party of the same name taking play 27 May 2000.
Article published on N64 Squid

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