A very nice assembly made scenery generator that creates stunning scenery on a stock Amiga with Kickstart 1.3 or higher. It came out at a time when Amiga 500 was just one year old. It uses the old AmigaOS look but it works really great on our 68060 Amiga 1200 with AmigaOS 3.1.4.
The scenery is an app that was uploaded to Aminet in 1988. It Generates very realistic looking landscapes which showed how far ahead the Amiga was at that time. It even includes an intuition interface and lots of menu options. I had a play with it in the video below
Scenery opens in a none standard PAL mode
Once you have downloaded Scenery. Just unarchive it and it will work. However. The app opens in a none standard PAL mode so my VHS USB2.0 Grabber that I used for Amitopia TV doesn’t grab the image. So I had to film my screen while explaining it.
In the application, you can create several interesting landscapes. Once you’ve made the landscape that you want to have. You can save the IFF image. It will be stored in the Scenery application folder as there is no file requester popping up. This must be one of the very first landscape generators for sure.
Media made Amiga looked underpowered!
VistaPro which is the most known landscape generator for Amiga wasn’t out and the PCs weren’t strong enough to show what an Amiga 500 were capable of until 1993 at least. So, VistaPro version 3 was the very first version out for the x86 PC platform.
It was not unusual for a landscape generation to take several hours on a stock 68000 based computer. But once any Amiga is equipped with a 68030 with FPU, 68040, 68060, and even 68080 CPUs from Motorola and Apollo Team. Amiga’s are able to deliver horsepower to the rendering. Many magazines wrote in 1993 that Amiga didn’t have power. But that was a huge lie!
Amiga 3000 came out in 1990 with a strong 68030 CPU and 16MB of RAM. The MHz on this machine was either 16MHz or 25MHz but it was a full 68030 with FPU! This CPU is fully equal to a very strong 386! Also, Amiga came with a fully multitasking operating system in full GUI. AmigaOS 3.x which I am still using today was way ahead of any Windows or macOS system at that time. It wasn’t until late 1995 that Windows 95 came and even then it would take a long road for the PCs to beat Amiga in graphics and sound. Every Amiga can produce 14-bit sound when used in DBLPAL mode or if you use a graphics card. Amiga is a huge misunderstood computer. It’s sad and for me, as an Amiga user, I felt every time the scene lost users to the PC platform because of false and wrong information spread around.
The soundcards never reached the Amiga in sound quality as Paula managed. The only thing that is improved on the x86 platform is the graphics cards on PCs and Macs (which are expensive PCs now).
All of the big-box Amigas were many times faster and way more Upgradeable than any PC!
If you think that your PC was inferior to the Amiga. It’s a huge lie! With the Amigas superior custom chips only it looked like it because the Amiga couldn’t use standard monitors as the PC could. A multiscan monitor was needed. But the resolutions that Amiga used weren’t worse at all just different. And when the ISA, Zorro, and even PCI graphics cards came out for them. Amiga outperforms any PC up to 586!
Before Amiga 3000, Amiga 4000 or even Amiga 1200 came out. The Amiga 2000 was shipped with a Motorola 68000 CPU, running at 7.14MHz. However. That machine was sold with lots of different configurations. I just don’t know how the PC scene could get away with that they made better machines? Amiga 2000 was miles ahead of any PC for years!
Amiga 2000 is one of Amiga’s most expandable Amiga computers ever made. The Amiga 2000 CPU can be upgraded to a 68010 by direct replacement. Official and third-party expansion boards make it a powerful machine too. But Amiga 2000 boosts not only 68k upgrades. There were x86 PC cards released for it which made MS-DOS experience much faster. Same with the Mac Emulation software. Amiga machines just outperformed the PC in every way. But the PC fanboys didn’t want to believe that. They just continued shouting that Amiga can’t do 3D and can’t play Doom which is the biggest lie ever.
Also, I want to mention that the Amiga 2000 consists of both a 68000 socket that can be replaced and a CPU expansion slot, give it a humongous advantage over most of Amigas. So this expandable Amiga machine can feature 68020, 68030, 68040, 68060, or 68080 FPGA. Such upgrades may also accommodate additional RAM, FPUs, MMUs, and even SCSI controllers.
PC Magazines and it’s Media didn’t care about Amiga Power just Profit
The PC x86 media gave the impression that Amiga’s were underpowered in Europe. In the USA, that was the opposite in the beginning as I understand.
The scenery is just a small app for Amiga that is unknown but it shows what power Amiga had back in 1988. It could render beautifully generated landscapes! But for most of the people, the VistaPro landscape generator was huge. Lightwave 3D, Cinema 4D, Real3D, or Imagine3D are also applications that were released for Amiga that would never be achievable if Amiga’s were that underpowered as the PC scene claimed. Also on the video front, Amiga was miles ahead until digital video editing became standard.
All Amigas were as fast or faster than any 286, 386, 486, or even a 586. The low-end Amiga’s such as Amiga 500, Amiga 600, and Amiga 1200 gave a false impression of what the Amiga could do. But the reality was that all Amiga’s except for Amiga CD32 is computers and not consoles! AmigaOS boosted Amiga’s power a lot over any PC or Mac until Pentium II came. If the PC magazines wrote correctly about Amiga the popularity of Amiga would have been different today.
Download Corner
Tested on Amiga 1200 with 68060 and AmigaOS 3.1.4 without Issues
Should work on any Amiga with AmigaOS 1.x or higher
