why not just play in directdraw 32 bit? ive played for my entire worms career with that setting, no problems.
people are a bit prissy about their settings, you cant play worms unless it is some directx9 thing marian?
DirectDraw is an ancient and very unoptimal renderer nowadays (and at the time of its introduction as well, given how it works internally -
painting pixels onto your desktop... it's a huge mess). It's been deprecated for use since 2000 (and not used in most games made after 2000), and has had several performance penalties over new releases of Windows systems (as it's in maintenance mode and not going to be updated). It saw its largest performance hit with Windows 8 (which was one of the driving factors to include new renderers into the game). In Windows 10, after some updates, it seems they have improved performance of software-rendered DirectDraw, but overall compatibility is the same. Hardware-rendered ddraw is still 2fps in 1080p (and is never going to be fixed).
With Direct3D 9 you can also window your game and have third-party overlays such as Steam. It'd be much harder to implement something like that for DirectDraw. For DirectDraw, the existing windowed mode solutions are far from optimal and involve a lot of wrappers.