Sound not working on "The Lurking Horror"

[barney]

Has anybody played the lurking horror from Infocom.  I remember playing about 15 years ago and it had awesome sound effects.  I copied the ADF file to a disk but I can't get the sound to work.  Does anybody know why this is?  This isn't a hardware problem because sound works on all of my other games.  Thank you.

Barney

[save2600]

I just tried this too and didn't hear any sounds. Made an .adf of it as well and noticed there is a 'sound' drawer with .mid and .dat files in it. Just ran it from Workbench 3.9 though with Kickstart 3.1. I wonder if it requires KS 1.3 or lower in order to work correctly?

[barney]

I tried my Amiga 2000 w/KS 1.3 and workbench 1.3 but no luck.  I remember this worked fine for my Amiga 1000 with KS 1.1 and 1.2 just fine.  This sucks.  I remember that the sound effects made this game scary as hell.

Barney

[save2600]

Okay... just tried it on my A1000 w/ KS 1.1. Still no sounds. I haven't played this in soooo long. At which point are you supposed to hear sounds? I poked around, went up and down the elevator, went outside up on the roof where the wind is supposed to be howling, etc.

BTW: playing these adventure games on an A1000 seriously rocks! I love the feel of that keyboard. And the way the text fills the entire screen on the older Workbenches. Playing these text games on a modern OS with the little window is a pain.  

[barney]

I hear ya.  LUckily I have a 3 way selectable kickstart.  I can select 1.3, 2.0 and 3.1.  I love the full screen also, it does rock.  Text adventures were always more fun on Commodore computers.  Completely blow PC's away.  If anybody can figure it out, let me know.

Barney

[barney]

I have a question.  Could it be that the Amiga does not know how to play the sound file?  Is there somthing in the C: or S: folder that needs to be configured?  Maybe this could fix this problem.

Barney

[save2600]

There isn't jack in the C and S directories of this .adf. All I saw was startup-sequence in S which pointed to load the game and C had a binary file I couldn't access. Since those sound files are .dat and .mid... perhaps we have to have a midi player installed? Funny that wouldn't be on the disk... back in the day, to play these commercial games, you never had to have a 3rd party plug-in installed. That was part of the beauty and allure of the system from the start!

So there are supposed to be sounds right off the bat then?  

[barney]

You might be right about a midi player.  The funny thing is that I played this on my Kickstart 1.1 A1000 with nothing but basic workbench.  I have no idea why it would need any additional programs.  Do you have a midi player?  If you do, install it and see what happens.  I imagine that we have to direct these particular files to be played using the midi player installed.  

Barney

[save2600]

Actually, after Kickstart loaded, I booted directly off the game disk. I also tried it with KS 1.1, WB 1.1 and KS 1.3 and WB 1.3 on my A1000. Nadda. I highly doubt you'd need a midi-player installed in order to hear these sounds because that would take some assigning, etc. to do. I don't see docs anywhere that point to such a procedure. I bet something is missing off the .adf disk, such as the player or whatever. Sorry, but at least you got some confirmation it's not just your setup!

I've got this on the  Lost Treasures of Infocom disks too, but same results.

Wikipedia has some good info on this game. I guess the Amiga version was the only one with sound. Now if we can only get the damn thing to work!

[barney]

I noticed that various other sound files on my hard drive, if I right click and click "information", it asks me what program to play sound through.  I am betting that we could also do the same with these Midi sounds.  Maybe I will check aminet.net and see if there is a small application that invisibly plays these files.

Barney

[barney]

Check out this site:
http://www.thegamearchives.com/?val=0_2_1_0_0_4_17_0_12_8_0

This has three different versions of Lurking Horror.  I am going to try all three.  Maybe one of these versions will work.

Barney

[rockersuke]

The docs in the Amiga version of Frotz (a popular interpreter of infocom's z-machine format games) have a section about sound wich deals specifically with Lurking Horror pointing to some aditional files avalaible at the if-archive. I can't check it out as I'm at job right now, but it might provide useful info.

AmigaFrotz at Aminet: here

AmigaFrotz at the if-archive: here

[CLS2086]

Maybe you need to hack the game ...  :idea:

[barney]

This is very interresting.  I was able to play the sound finles ex: s16.dat using a "Audiomaster".  I think that somthing was changed or dropped when the game was converted to an ADF file.  I remember back it in the day it would work flawlessly.  No tweaking/hacking or anything was required.  It was as simple and automatic as getting sound from any other Amiga game.  Oh well.  Maybe I will go through my old Amiga disks.  Maybe I still have it on an unlabled disk.  If I find the solution, I will let everybody know.

Barney

[save2600]

@Barney,

 I have an original Lurking Horror from the Treasures of Infocom on disk. I compared the files from the .adf to the retail one. Identical. Same audio files and everything. Even the retail version does not produce sounds! This is a bigger mystery than the game itself and nobody seems to have an answer. lol