Like the Monopoly board game, the Worms series has always had the potential to destroy families and friendships in a few minutes. The Worms 2 from 1997 has been especially recognized for its multiplayer mode, but with 25 years on its shoulders, the only thing we have at our disposal is a stripped-down and buggy version on Good Old Games. Nathan Baggs, known on YouTube for his debugging and programming videos, decided to face Worms 2 and try to correct its bugs…
Available information indicates that Worms 2 reached the European market in the last days of November 1997. Team17 worked on this game at the same time as they were preparing Worms: The Director's Cut, a “farewell gift” for Commodore Amiga users. Several of its improvements served as a base for Worms 2, but its most important technical feature was the inclusion of SVGA graphics.
With more than 250,000 copies sold, the public didn't take long to confirm that the heart of Worms 2 was hidden in its multiplayer mode. However, a quarter of a century has passed since then, and playing Worms 2 on current versions of Windows is an impossible task… unless we make some modifications. Nathan Baggs, a youtuber expert in debugging, stated that Worms 2 is one of his favorite games, and he decided to track down its errors, one step at a time.
How to play Worms 2 after 25 years
Nathan explored some recommendations on the official GOG forum, but while studying the code with a debugger he discovered that the game enters a loop, trying to locate the winmm.dll file, a legacy audio component in Windows. The search for references to winmm.dll sent him to win32.dll inside the game, and with the help of Ghidra, he unearthed a link to the ogg-winmm module on GitHub. Long story short, the game assumes it will always be loaded from a CD, where the audio files were originally stored. Ogg-winmm is just a wrapper responsible for redirecting all those audio calls from the CD to the local installation. The problem… is that it doesn't work with Windows 10.
This failure is due to the use of relative paths. Once Nathan removed them from the file, Worms 2 started without problems, but the battle doesn't end here: the GOG version doesn't include multiplayer support. The second half of the first video and all of the second video focus on repairing that mode. However, Nathan discovered something essential: the community has been working on Worms 2 for years, with community patches, official servers, and a large Discord discussion space.
Patch for “Worms 2 Plus”: Click here
