Talk:The Lurking Horror

Dangerous millipedes

(sigh) I loved this game. I was recently packing everything into boxes for moving house and found it. The rubber millipede had "melted" into the 3" floppy disk. When I pulled it out, it had left a shaped indentation across one corner. What on earth was it made of?! IainP (talk) 14:14, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

PVC or "vinyl", like many fishing lures. It's made soft and highly flexible by addition of "plasticizers", which are typically oily substances with small molecules that fit among and between the larger molecules of the base plastic and allow them to be moved relative to one another more easily. Unfortunately, the plasticizers leach out onto anything these soft vinyls come into contact with, and often have damaging consequences for other plastic items. Harder PVC formulations, ABS, styrene, acrylic, and many other plastics are vulnerable to such damage. There is no way to remove the plasticizers from the surface of soft vinyl items like this, since more would simply leach out to replace whatever is removed. If you could somehow remove all plasticizers from the item, it would no longer be very flexible.

The best protection is to keep such items from coming into contact with one another. Fortunately, "Ziplock"-type polyethylene plastic bags are not susceptible to damage from most vinyl plasticizers, and are effective in containing them. Drop the critter in one of those, and it won't eat any more of your floppies. BTW, it represents a centipede, not a millipede.

A.—Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.118.103.191 (talk • contribs)

Sound effects

The article says: "it was ported to the Amiga and Atari ST with the addition of sound effects, making it the first title with that feature.".

This may be incorrect. I played about 60% of the Atari ST version and don't recall any sound.

--Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 11:47, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for catching that. I know the Amiga version had sound effects, but didn't know about the Atari ST version. I assumed it would have them, since it also had high-end sound abilities, but I guess I was wrong. Corrected it in the article. — Frεcklεfσσt | Talk 13:08, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

The Infocom Fact Sheet agrees; it says releases 219 and 221, the ones with sound, were Amiga only. Ntsimp (talk) 16:02, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

The Atari ST did not have high-end sound capabilities, like the Amiga, which has custom graphics and sound chips (Denise and Paula), with four channels in stereo. The ST had the same sound chip as the 8-bit Sinclair Spectrum, with three channels in mono, IIRC. The ST did have a built-in MIDI port though, which was the only thing it had over the Amiga. Yeah, I had an Amiga. jason404 (talk) 00:45, 9 October 2012 (UTC)