Anonymous edits have been disabled on the wiki. If you want to contribute please login or create an account.

Earthworm Jim: Special Edition

From PCGamingWiki, the wiki about fixing PC games
Earthworm Jim: Special Edition
Earthworm Jim: Special Edition cover
Developers
Shiny Entertainment
Windows Kinesoft
Publishers
Activision
Playmates Interactive Entertainment
Release dates
Windows November 30, 1995
Taxonomy
Monetization One-time game purchase
Modes Singleplayer
Pacing Real-time
Perspectives Side view
Controls Direct control
Genres Platform
Series Earthworm Jim
Earthworm Jim: Special Edition on MobyGames
Earthworm Jim: Special Edition on Wikipedia
Earthworm Jim
Earthworm Jim: Special Edition 1995
Earthworm Jim 1996
Earthworm Jim 2 1996
Earthworm Jim 3D 2000

Key points

Port of the Sega CD/Mega-CD Special Edition of the game which contained an exclusive level, a few extended levels, alternate endings, and CD quality music.
Running the game properly on modern Windows will require a few steps and workarounds, even if it does run mostly fine out of the box. See Issues fixed.
Runs on par with the Mega Drive/Genesis version; far faster and smoother than the DOS PC port.
Improved visuals and sound effects over the Sega CD/Mega-CD version.
A couple of short audio cues were removed, replaced by lower quality versions, or are incomplete; e.g. the victory and failure music that plays at the end of Andy Asteroids, the voice at the title screen, and the bad ending speech.
A few visual effects are absent relative to the Sega CD version; eg. the foreground fog in What the Heck, the darkness vignette in Intestinal Distress, and the distortion effect in Down the Tubes/Tube Race.

Availability

Source DRM Notes Keys OS
Retail
Disc check (requires the CD/DVD in the drive to play)
Runs directly off of the disc, uses Redbook audio for music. Can run off of your hard drive if you copy the files over, but the disc is still required for DRM and music.
Windows

Game data

Configuration file(s) location

System Location
Windows HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Activision\Earthworm[Note 1]

Save game data location

System Location
Windows HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Activision\Earthworm[Note 1]

Video

Graphics feature State Notes
Widescreen resolution
320x224 and 640x448, shown as 640x480, are selectable. Custom resolutions can be set by editing Window_SizeX and Window_SizeY in the registry, or manually dragging the resize handle of the window, but any sizes other than 320x224 are simply scaled from that.
Multi-monitor
Ultra-widescreen
4K Ultra HD
Field of view (FOV)
Windowed
Game always runs in a window.
Borderless fullscreen windowed
See the glossary page for potential workarounds.
Anisotropic filtering (AF)
Anti-aliasing (AA)
High-fidelity upscaling
See the glossary page for potential workarounds.
Vertical sync (Vsync)
See the glossary page for potential workarounds.
60 FPS and 120+ FPS
No fps cap
High dynamic range display (HDR)

Input

Audio

Audio feature State Notes
Separate volume controls
Surround sound
Subtitles
Closed captions
Mute on focus lost
The game pauses, and any CD music stops playing when focus is lost.
Royalty free audio
Red Book CD audio
On Windows, CD music might not play correctly; see the troubleshooting guide for solutions.

Localizations

Language UI Audio Sub Notes
English
Language options are given in the options menu, but they only change the language of the options menus.

Issues fixed

Music doesn't play/"Earthworm Jim cannot detect audio tracks" error

Change drive letter/path for CD or .ISO image to "A:"[citation needed]
  1. Right click on "My Computer" and click "Manage."
  2. Click on "Disk Management" (Under "Storage").
  3. Right click the drive you have assigned for your CD or .ISO image and click "Change drive letter or path."
  4. Change it to a value lower than you currently have. For example, if your ISO is mounted on "F:" set it to "A:".

Music doesn't loop

Pause and unpause the game[citation needed]
  1. Click outside the window of the game to pause it.
  2. Click on the game window to focus the window.
  3. Press any button or key to unpause the game. The music should start playing again.

No sound effects play/game crashes at the title screen

Set compatibility mode to Windows 95 and replace WAIL32.DLL[1]
  1. Copy the contents of the ASSETS folder on the CD to your computer.
  2. Right click on WORM.EXE and select "Properties" (you should be running the game using this EXE from now on).
  3. Go to the "Compatibility" tab and set the game to run in compatibility mode for Windows 98 / ME. Windows 95 will also work, but may cause problems with XInput controllers that 98 / ME does not.
  4. Download this fixed WAIL32.DLL.
  5. Go to the folder that you copied the game's assets to.
  6. Replace the old WAIL32.DLL with the one that was downloaded.

Graphics are not displayed properly

Run the game in 256 color mode[citation needed]
  1. Right click on WORM.EXE and select "Properties".
  2. Go to the "Compatibility" tab and set the game to run in 256 color mode.

Notes

If encountering rainbow colors when running the game in 256 color mode, then check this article.

Other information

API

Executable 32-bit 64-bit Notes
Windows

System requirements

Windows
Minimum
Operating system (OS) 95
Processor (CPU) 486/66 MHz
System memory (RAM) 8 MB
Hard disk drive (HDD)
Video card (GPU) VESA Local Bus or PCI Video
256-Color SVGA Card
Sound (audio device) Sound Card
Other 2x CD-ROM


Notes

  1. 1.0 1.1 Applications writing to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE will be redirected to other locations based on various criterias, see the glossary page for more details.

References