It was running fine on w8.1, but since Ive installed w10 it's not loading past the intro. I tried this:

https://www.gog.com/forum/worms_series/plugin_windowed_mode_for_worms_2_improve_windows_8_performance

but unfortunately it didn't work.

Will gog fix this at some point? Is there a fix for w10?

Thanks in advance :))

Update in case someone has the same problem (and an original worms 2 disc): I managed to get it working, but to do so I had to install both Gog and old-cd version, move oldcd "frontend" exe to the gog folder and run it under xp sp3 compatibility.

Works for me too, thanks for that solution :)

Did you refer to this fix when contacting them? I'm guessing there might be a difference between wanting to spend time trying to fix something, and just deploying a fix someone found to work.

Sadly I have only Armageddon and World Party on disc, so I cannot try to use this fix, but really if it's just the frontend.exe file which is the issue that really ought not be such a problem to replace.

Tried reinstalling Worms 2, tried to poke the launcher with 7-zip, had fun reading strings and extracitng bmp and wav files. Then noticed...there's a file called win32.dll in the folder.

This reminded me of Pandemonium which is also not windows 10 compatible, but works if you replace the win32.dll file with a fixed winmm.dll file (referenced from the X-wing forum).
Copied the Win32.dll file from Pandemonium to replace the one in Worms2. And now Worms2 will launch and run. Kinda choppy though.

However on exiting the game, Frontend.exe will stay running but not responding and pretty much freezing Explorer until you kill it. First time I tried, Explorer restarted. Second time it left Explorer alone but working.

I hadn't seen this one yet when I contacted them. Might give it another shot. I did check with procmon and noticed a continuous loop of opening winmm.dll by the Worms 2 Frontend. I'll see if your solution works later this week, if it does I'll get in touch with GOG support again.

Previously I also managed to fix a few of the game's files by hand, so a match would at least launch with some default settings/terrain/etc. This was also choppy, but the Windows 8+ fixes referred to on this forum can help with that (plus it'll run in a higher resolution too). Those fixes might also help you.

[UPDATE] It works! For others:
1. Download this zip file
2. Extract the zip. For some other games than Worms 2, you may also have to rename win32.dll to winmm.dll.
3. Put the fixed win32.dll and the other dll files (libogg-0.dll, libvorbis-0.dll, libvorbisfile-3.dll) in the Worms 2 installation folder
4. Right-click "frontend.exe", choose Properties, Compatibility, then set it to run with "Windows XP (Service Pack 3)" compatibility. This will solve some issues like hanging on shut-down or after a match.
5. Get the ReSolution patch from http://worms2d.info/ReSolution and install it to the Worms 2 installation folder. This will solve choppy and low-res gameplay in matches, replacing it with buttersmooth hi-res goodness.
6. Play the game.

FYI: You might still get a warning that the application may not have closed properly right before the intro movie shows, but I'll happily ignore that.

Thanks to DrakeFox above, StepS_ at https://www.gog.com/forum/worms_series/worms_2_resolution_change_hackpatch and the guys in this thread for all tips!

[Last edit: updated post with improved win32.dll that also works with Worms 2, see post 9 ]

Well done to test out the ReSolution patch and finding the WinXP SP3 thing. Now all that seems left is to get music working again. Evidently the linked Winmm.dll file doesn't work the same way as the one Gog initially provided.
I'm guessing they're based on ogg-winmm Github, discontinued

Sadly, I don't know much about C coding, certainly not enough to figure out what the problem is, but potentially the Winmm linked is the one this guy built and chronicled what changes to ogg-winmm he did on his blog Here

The change he made seem to be mostly commenting out the creation of a thread in the initialization of using the library, he mentions this partly because of causing deadlocks which seems like what the original gog issue is.

SOTE might use the library differently and thus it'll work without the thread creation there. And Win 10 does things in Winmm differently enough that the originally used method causes deadlocks while commenting it out leaves us without ogg playback.

Maybe some day when I'm not so lazy and get around to actually installing MinGW, and a build environment, and learn enough C to not just understand the code, but also have a clue how to dump to a file which calls Worms makes, I might manage to fix this up, seems like a worthwhile project.
There might however be someone a bit less hackish with C experience to whom building on the ogg-winmm code it's trivial to dump which calls worms 2 does, and implement a hopefully small change. It's really a nice way ogg-wimm replaces the calls in the first place.

edit: Also, noticing this being the third game I've had trouble getting to run on Windows 10, and the third game wherein the issue seems to be either win32.dll (alias of winmm.dll). I wonder how many of the currently "Win-10 incompatible" games are down to something fixable with a proper patching of this.

Edit of the edit: Make that four games. Redline faced the same issue it seems. When I forgot where I got winmm.dll from I searched my gog folder for winmm.dll, found it present in redline along with a winmm.dll.bak which indicates I applied this fix to Redline some time ago and forgot all about it.

If you look at https://github.com/bangstk/ogg-winmm there seems to be a version with Win10 support - I suppose the binary referred to in this forum is based off that one, since it works in Windows 10.

I might be able to figure something about this, maybe even get music working, in the next couple of days or so.

Music's now working too! I noticed that after one track finishes, the game will wait for the end of the turn before it starts to play the next track - so it all seems to be fine for as far as I've tested.

Download this zip (coming from my personal server) and extract the files to your Worms 2 folder to fix it. I've included the libvorbis/libogg files to make sure everything matches up, so it's probably best to overwrite existing files with these.

No credit to me though: rkkoszewski at GitHub fixed it for us some time ago already: https://github.com/rkkoszewski/ogg-winmm . I managed to just build that version and that one's working out of the box.

For Worms 2 I've renamed the file to win32.dll already; for other games this may need to be called winmm.dll.

Very nice there :-) I don't seem to be good at searching for projects which...fork? other projects.

Thank you very much for building it :-) The newest Github build is nov 12, whereas the latest commit is jan 24

Thanks tszcheetah, your solution from post #6 is really working on Windows 10 x64, but it is also pain in the ass, as Windows Explorer is crashing all the time...BTW, for me ReSolution just slows the game to unplayable level. :/

The compatibility mode (on FrontEnd.exe, nothing on Worms2.exe) seemed to fix the worst problems for me, although I haven't tested it very thoroughly yet. I can't try anything right now either.

If you have any compatibility options set on worms2.exe, you may need to disable those first.

Maybe you need to apply compatibility mode to some other processes too. I can't try right now, unfortunately..

As for ReSolution: did you use the regular version, or the one with windowed support? You can try playing around with its .ini files (ReSolution.ini or wndmode.ini) to see if that improves anything. For me the defaults (with windowed version) worked fine, but I can imagine it may help to e.g. set a lower resolution.

It worked for me after testing it out on a Windows 10 machine. Thank you so much! :D

If you're on Windows 8.x or 10, download the windowed version only. There's no longer any support for fast hardware-accelerated 8-bit ddraw in the latest versions of Windows. So you will have to leave this work to the wndmode.

Works for me =)