The Return of Dreams by Puni/Void
Reigniting the Dreams
Some of you may know that we in Void has restarted the old pack series “Dreams“, which was originally maintained and released on a regular basis by Apathy back in the 90’s.
The first issue was released on the 21st of August 1996 by Strife. It featured the intros from the Assembly party in Finland which took place that autumn. More followed compiled by Strife, but also one edition by Growl, and several by me (Puni). Everything came to an end, however, in December 2000, with issue 26. This was the last one to be released up until 2019!
Two issues has been released so far this year (2019) under the Void banner. This is thanks to my old friend, and now fellow Void member, Strife, who joined our team last year. We’re currently working on improving the design, so hopefully you’ll see some changes in the upcoming issue.
I Wonder
Many people will probably ask this question:
- “Why on Earth would you release a demo pack for the Amiga in 2019?”
Now, things have certainly changed a lot since the 90’s. There were plenty of swappers around back then, the Internet was not a widespread phenomena and some did not have hard drives in their Amiga computers. I remember swapping with people who only relied on floppies as their main way of storing their software. This worked fine until demos starting taking up considerably more space and after a while requiring a hard drive to run at all.
Back then it therefore made sense to make compilation-disks, consisting of utilities, intros and other stuff. You could for example get the best 64 KB intros from The Party, The Gathering or Assembly on one single floppy disk and easily store it in your diskbox. It would be instantly ready for use, accompanied (mostly) by a nice menu, a tune playing in the background and a scroll-text to read. You could click on the production you wanted to see and it would run straight away. When it was finished, you were taken back to the menu again.
The Current Situation
Let’s fast-forward to 2019. The Internet is everywhere. You can download a gigantic collection of demos in one evening if you want to or you can purchase the latest games you want to play in an instant. We have computers with 100’s upon 100’s of gigabytes of storage space and many new PC’s does not even contain an optical device or a floppy drive.
Despite this, the retro computer scene is more active than ever. There are many people enjoying using their old Amiga computers for everything from programming, painting and tracking to gaming, watching demos or listening to music.
When it comes to the Amiga, one of the more popular devices is the Gotek floppy drive emulator. This device makes it possible to run virtual floppy disk images (ADF-files) just as they were physical floppies on the real thing. You can have hundreds upon hundreds of disk images on one USB-stick and you can easily add or remove them. Best thing is, if you have an Amiga without HD, you’ll still have access to tons of software without a big hassle!
The Comeback of the Pack
This is where the comeback of the Dreams pack series comes into play.
The Gotek drives aren’t well suited for one disk image per intro, that would be a bit ridiculous, but what it is well suited for is a good, old demo pack featuring a nice selection of productions ready to run!
In this way the demo pack makes more sense today than some years ago. The advantages are that you don’t have to hunt around for the different files yourself, you don’t have to create disk images of them individually (if it has not already been done), you don’t have to have various archivers installed to unpack them (.ZIP, .LHA etc.) and you get everything in one place.
This is partly why we decided to start releasing issues of Dreams again. Not only because it is great fun (which it definitely is), but it will make it easier for people to access all those demo-related productions of smaller sizes by grabbing only one file from Aminet and get it transferred to a USB-stick. Running the pack from HD or regular floppy is of course supported, but I think with so many Gotek users, there is for sure a “market” for the classic demo packs. One can say that the threshold for downloading a .ZIP-file, perhaps needing to find an unpacker for it for the Amiga, then getting it over to the Amiga, and then again try to run it, is bigger than downloading an .ADF, stick it on USB and run it through the Gotek.
The Future
In this text we’ve looked at the Dreams pack series, its origins and why it has re-emerged from the forgotten corners of our hard drives. In the future we aim to release issues on a regular basis (as long as enough productions are released to include in it) and we work on improving it in various ways.
Thanks for reading and hope this article might inspire someone to restart one of their old pack series or maybe create a new one in the shape of this century.
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