Hi to all,

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This is my first post made in these forums, in fact I don’t post in forums much at all, but do read loads!
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I thought I would post my findings and experiences in using Dosbox to run Worms United fully 100% perfectly!

I understand that people have already reported running Worms United (WU) fully, but many seem to say you have to turn the FMV’s off……well to me that’s not 100% fully working and I was such a huge fan of WU and wanted the full experience back, but on my XP system.

So I am hoping this guide will help many people run WU 100%, the way it was meant to be played, but if for some reason it doesn’t, then maybe something here will help at least.

The first two major things is that this is for Worms United, not just Worms, though I have no experience with Worms, I do believe the two games install differently and maybe run differently. So for full success try to use WU. I also want to add I own the full original CD of WU and did not download or copy it. My second major point is the fact I have used many different version of Dosbox, and found the only one that runs it 100% is Dosbox 0.65. At time of Writing Dosbox 0.72 was the most recent. Unfortunately all the 0.7 builds played the FMV’s very jerky and no matter what I did, could not find a solution for smooth play back ( I tried a lot!). 0.65 played the FMV’s silky smooth, no tweaks were needed, except setting the right CPU cycles best for the machine its installed on. I found normally 4000 was best. Anything too high caused the FMV’s to skip or cause bad skipping sounds, even though in-game ran and sounded fine……so adjust CPU cycles that plays the FMV’s best…..the game its self should be fine! (also note older version of Dosbox before 0.65 “may” play FMV’s, but the game its self did not load…..blank screen)

So to clarify use Worms Reinforcements and Dosbox 0.65.

I found many ways of running WU, all of which pretty much worked fine, even directly from the CD (there is a way of doing this, which I shall explain latter).

I shall first off start by the normal traditional way. Simply mount the HDD you want the game installed to. I shall use D as the CD Rom drive letter and G for the HDD that worms will be installed to.

Its important to mount MSCDEX, so use this command to mount your CD ROM Drive

Mount d d:\ -t cdrom

Next mount your game HDD (were you want worms installed to)

Mount g g:\

Your ready to install WU just like the way its normally installed.

So change to your CD ROM drive and start the WU installation, which is install.exe

D:
Install

Follow the instructions, its more or less just saying yes and continue to everything.

Once installed, exit the installer and type Worms in the prompt……..Worms should hopefully be running fine……as I said earlier while the intro plays increase the CPU cycles to get the best result.

(NOTE, when you start Worms it asks to press “S” to skip into…..off the top of my memory if you did not press this in time, it continues anyway into the intro, so you had a few moment to press S if you wanted to jump straight to the start up screen. In Dosbox, it just sits there forever until you press either S to skip intro or N to watch the intro……I may be Wrong but don’t remember pressing N before?)

You should also here the Music in the game…..if you don’t you may have the audio cable missing from inside the PC…..though this should work through the IDE cable nowadays?? If this is the case, don’t worry, read below for another way to run WU and also without the CD ROM needed in the drive.

(Also note at this stage people have reported that you had to install Worms through windows, but run it through Dosbox……this may be true for previous version of Dosbos or maybe even for just Worms, but both ways worked fine, you can either install off the CD ROM through windows or though Dosbox after mounting the drives. However, I do highly recommend you install through Dosbox as the Worms.BAT is created during the install process and holds key information to running WU, not to mention the Dosbox environment is running and should make sound detection work better etc etc)

My second way running WU, (the way I do it), is by creating an ISO of the CD ROM. This is a virtual CD Rom drive and saves popping the CD in the drive each time (keep that Worms CD safe!). Also you may find things run faster as you don’t have to wait for a CD ROM spin up etc. One very important fact if you want 100% full WU experience is to be aware of the fact WU uses Audio CD for the music, this will not play on an ISO, unless you also create a CUE. The CUE file which runs along side the ISO file does not actually contain the CD music, it sort of directs the game to were the Audio is on the ISO image. So it is important to use software that can create both the ISO and CUE…..I used Isobuster…..the free trial edition you can download may work fine for this…..I use the full version, so cant be sure?

Once you have the ISO and the CUE file, simply mount the CUE file instead of the CD ROM drive. I store my image files in a folder called wormscd, within my worms installation folder so I use the command

Imgmount d g:\worms\wormscd\wormscd.cue –t iso

You can then go to the d: prompt to view the ISO just like a CD ROM drive, except its virtual. This means if you have not installed worms yet, you can from the ISO exactly the same way….just go to the d: drive and type install.

(NOTE- if you have already installed worms, you can still carry on and use the ISO instead of the CD ROM, but always make sure the drive letter of the ISO is the same as the CD ROM drive letter you used to install worms).

You can also simply copy the contents of the Worms CD to a folder on the HDD, mount that as a CD ROM and install/play worms, but as I said the Music is stored differently and will not be copied across, so no music for you!.....but why do this, the music is great and you may as well create the ISO, or if its too much hassle (though really its not that hard), just run it from the CD ROM…..you then gain the full experience.

Finally, you can run the whole game from the CD ROM…..but, if you have WU, you shall find there is no Worms.bat located on the CD….Wrms.exe is different….it wont work. Basically the Worms.bat used to launch the game is created when the game is installed……so you will need to at least install the game once to get the Worms.bat file, you can then modify this file to run everything from the CD ROM, and you can delete the worms installed files….except the Worms.bat of course.

Modifying the Worms.bat file is not as hard or even as complicated as it sounds! Simply open the Worms.bat file using Notepad…..good old Notepad. You shall see some simple, lines of code very much like this….

Press CTRL-F12 repeatedly until the cpu cycles are sufficient (I suggest in excess of 10,000)
type 'worms' to play.

@cls
@echo PREPARING TO PLAY WORMS Copyright 1995/96 Team17 Software Ltd.
@echo.
@choice /C:NS /N /T:N,3 "Press S to skip intro and quick-load the game..."
@if errorlevel 2 goto skip
@if errorlevel 1 goto intro

:intro
@cls
@E:\games\worms\bin\black.exe
SET dos4g=quiet
SET wormscfg=E:\games\worms\worms.cfg
SET wormscd=F:
@G:\fmv\play F:\fmv\logo2.avi
@G:\fmv\play F:\fmv\logo1.avi
@G:\fmv\play F:\fmv\armup.avi
@E:\games\worms\bin\black.exe
@E:\games\worms\bin\WUms
@goto end
:skip
@cls
@E:\games\worms\bin\black.exe
SET dos4g=quiet
SET wormscfg=E:\games\worms\worms.cfg
SET wormscd=F:
@E:\games\worms\bin\WUms
:end

All your really interested is were the directories point to. If you can mount drives in dosbox etc im sure you can figure out what does what etc. Simple change the paths to point to your CD ROM drive ( keeping folder names the same) and then run the file once its saved. You can also see why its important to always use the same drive letters you used to install WU, as its all contained in this file. ……you can even do more things here such as copy the FMV’s to the HDD, and change the path so the game runs them from that location instead of from the CD…..it may even help you solve some problems if you are having any for any various reasons?

Finally….one last problem I overcome was the fact when I exit the game and restarted it all my team names etc were all gone!!!1….doh!1 I tried to figure this out for ages…..but it was a silly thing in the end. I (think) worms used to save all data when you exit…..running in Dosbox does not seem to do this…..im pretty sure the game used to do this?? Anyway, simply after changing settings, creating teams etc etc, go to the in game Worms options and click on Save/Load and Save the current settings, this will then save to the worms.cfg file……next time you load worms its all there. When you play a match all your statistic etc are saved automatically because the continue button saves to worms.cfg anyway…..so just manually save when creating Teams and changing options…..no big deal…..which means I lied a tad.....I got worms working 99.9% fine 🤣…..unless you always had to manually save team and game options?

Also some people report tuning on Double buffering in the Worms options…..I didn’t notice any difference, but if you have a fast machine this should be On anyway. If you still have any problems, turn the FMV’s off in the options….but that defeats getting the game working 100%....but it may help figure out whats Wrong and to fix it eventually.

Also don’t forget you can mount all the drives etc in the Dosbox Config file under Autoexec……it saves all that typing……you can even set it to load the game right up as soon as you run Dosbox…..super Worms freak!!

I really really hope this does help people get WU working 100% or the way they want on their system. Worms really is a fantastic game and is the best…..Worms 2 and Worms 3D were ok in their own way….but WU is the best….and funniest. I only wish I can also help people that only have just Worms……but maybe some of this will help??

Let me know if you have any questions and how you get on and find this help guide……if its not helped at all….im sorry.javascript:emoticon(':sad:');

Also sorry this got long….but wanted to cover all angles and ultimately help people Run WU without having to jump about from thread to thread piecing bits together and searching the web for days!
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😊