Sunday, July 8, 2012

Championship Manager 2001-2002 Free Download

Some time back Eidos made CM01-02 available for free. I can't find a direct link on their website, but here's a link on fmscout.

http://www.fmscout.com/a-championship-manager-0102-free-download.html

Anyway, this of itself isn't really big news. However, the way I found it is a bit more interesting. I wanted to recreate some classic players (specifically Roy Keane) in FM2012. I was looking for old screenshots of players from FM 2006 or so to basically reverse engineer old player stats. The problem is, players age oddly, and I would never see something like PA. I did manage to find some screenshots of Roy Keane from '06, but it wasn't going to be easy or accurate to recreate him.

I'd never played CM. So when I downloaded it, the first thing to note is that it won't run natively in Windows 7. It complains there's no memory available. However, if you right click on the exe in the start menu, you can run it in compatibility test, and it'll run just fine under Windows XP emulation that's built into Windows 7. It did freak out when I switched to windowed mode, but when I re-launched it everything was fine. Anyway, I don't plan to play it, but I turned off attribute masking and was able to see much of what I wanted.

Then I got a bit smart and noticed the editor. Here it is, the holy grail. It lists everything. CA/PA, attributes, relationships, history. It's perfect for my needs, and it will be a lot more fair than reverse engineering players. I don't think I'd have given Keano a 6 temperament for instance, but upon reflection, that's probably dead on. Anyway, off to play with a new savegame.