Hi all. This message is for the Limited Run customers who preordered Worms for SNES. Let’s take inventory of where things are with this release, and then offer you a choice about what’s best for you.
Our project started with a straightforward goal: to take the beloved version of Worms long enjoyed on European Super Nintendo systems, and bring that same game to the North American SNES.
The LRG dev team has been, from the very beginning, ridiculously excited about this prospect. They worked with Francis Lillie, the original Worms SNES programmer, who provided the original source code. They tracked down original dev tools to assemble, link, and buildthe executable on old disks. Every effort was being taken to preserve the genius and fidelity of the original programmers.
Then we hit a big snag.
Although they appear at first glance to be functionally identical, the European SNES and the North American SNES are distinct in one key way. Europe’s SNES features a 50Hz refresh rate to match European televisions of the era; America’s SNES uses 60Hz. Usually that’snot a huge problem, but it proved one for porting Worms.
On both European and North American SNES consoles, there’s something called a vertical blank period, which is tied to each machine’s refresh rate. The vertical blank period is the only time an SNES can access its video RAM. That’s a hardware fact of life–and itpresents a very special obstacle for this particular game.
The vertical blank period for a 50Hz machine is longer than that of a 60Hz machine, so a European SNES has more time to get the work done in video. The very clever original programmers of European SNES Worms squeezed every imaginable ounce into their video RAM time,making the game function beautifully.
They were so efficient that physically, because of the way Worms is coded, a North American SNES can not accurately duplicate it. The amount of time necessary to run Worms at full speed just isn’t there, because its vertical blank period is significantly shorter andthat can’t be changed in software. There’s simply not enough room in a single North American blank to fit the data they crammed into a European blank.
The only way our team found to accomplish porting Worms to North American hardware using the original source was to cut system speed on the North American SNES to 30Hz. This doubles the amount of time available to access video RAM, giving the engineers two blanks,more than enough to work with… but slowing the game noticeably. That’s what the team ultimately went with. The game works and it plays quite well, but it’s slower than its European counterpart.
Could the engineers have built a native 60Hz NTSC version of Worms? Possibly, but not without modifications of the engine and content itself- like changes to screen size, or other similar compromises that would have made the experience worse in different ways,radically altering the game.
Since this became apparent, there have been a lot, and I mean a LOT, of passionate discussions at LRG headquarters on the way to handle this understanding that Worms on NTSC would run at 30Hz. After a lot of thinking, we’ve decided that the most authentic thing we cando is offer every customer a choice.
If you've already ordered Worms and wish to receive it in its current, functional, fully playable 30Hz North American form, you don’t have to do anything. We’ll mail it to you when complete, along with
a bonus $40 USD Limited Run Games giftcard in appreciation for your patience. Manufacturing will take 4-5 months after we’ve gathered everyone’s responses.
If you don’t want Worms as described, click here to initiate a full refund, and you’ll still be eligible for the gift card. This option is available for you to choose through November 30.
Whichever you select, we are sorry it’s taken so long. You have shown extraordinary patience, and we are deeply grateful and humbled. This delay was born out of an effort to get the best possible working product into your hands, and we wanted to give you transparencyinto the process and the product state before moving any further forward.
Sincerely,
Limited Run Games
