CM 01/02: Bosman Edition

Championship Manager 01/02, rebuilt to run natively on Mac, Windows and Linux.
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The Bosman Edition is the 2002 game, version 3.9.68, translated instruction by instruction from the original Windows program into C and compiled for each computer. No emulator runs underneath. The match engine, the transfers and every decision of the game are the ones from 2002.

Each download is ready to play. It holds the game files of the free release that Eidos published in 2008, with the last official patch. It needs no CD and no Wine.

• Runs on macOS 11 or later (Apple silicon and Intel), Windows 10 and 11 (64-bit), and 64-bit Linux. The Linux AppImage also runs on the Steam Deck in desktop mode.
• Widescreen at 1280 × 800 in a window you can resize, with sharp scaling. The original 800 × 600 layout is one setting away.
• Any season from 2001/02 to 2026/27 on the Choose Season screen, with a database for every season in the download. Each season has its own leagues, cups, European and international competitions, substitutes, foreign player rules and transfer windows.
• In a long game the rules change each July as they did in real life, and a news item lists what changed. You can switch this off and keep your start season's rules.
• Three versions of the official 2001/02 data on its tile: 3.9.60, the original data (the default), 3.9.65, the December 2001 update, and 3.9.68, with the summer 2002 transfers. Click the chosen tile to change the version.
• A Custom database tile for a database folder of your own. You say which season it holds, and that season's rules apply.
• Best XI and squad depth on one screen, with the next two players for each place.
• An Assistant menu on the squad screen picks the best team, the fittest team or an under-21 team, scored by the key attributes of each position.
• Clickable player and club names, coloured attributes, condition and morale.
• Holiday until the next match, faster days on holiday and a Fastest commentary speed.
• Save names with your club and the date, and the last three copies of each save in a backups folder.
• Keyboard shortcuts, and a window that opens where you left it.

Each feature is a line in settings.txt in the save folder and can be switched off. In the base game (2001/02, 3.9.68, changing rules off) no feature changes a match result. The site lists every setting with its default.

Saved games are in ~/Library/Application Support/cm0102 on a Mac, %APPDATA%\cm0102 on Windows and ~/.local/share/cm0102 on Linux. A new version does not touch them. The Open folder button on Load Game opens this folder, and so does the one on the Save folder row of the Bosman Edition Options box, which also shows its full path.

0.6.0, released on 29 October 2026, added Choose Season: any season from 2001/02 to 2025/26 with its own squads, leagues, cups and rules, and rules that change each July in a long game. The test report says how it was tested.

Next is 0.6.1, with fixes for the problems that players report on 0.6.0.

Planned for 0.7.0 (#45): easy online play with friends. The host gets a short join code and friends type it in, with no extra patch or VPN.

The original program is about 9,400 functions of 32-bit x86 code. The recompiler in tools/recomp translates each function into C. A small runtime in src/recomp_rt replaces the Windows calls the game makes (windows, drawing, files, sound, input) with SDL2. Fixes and features hook the game through checked addresses: the build stops if a hooked address no longer matches the original. A smoke test plays the game from a new game to the first news, and further tests play a match and compare saved games byte for byte.

The repository holds no part of the original game. To build it, you need your own copy of the 2008 free release (CM0102.iso) and the official 3.9.68 patch (cm0102_3968.exe).

python3 -m pip install capstone
python3 tools/clean_files/make_clean_files.py CM0102.iso cm0102_3968.exe ../clean-3968
cmake -S . -B build -DCM0102_EXE=../clean-3968/cm0102.exe -DRECOMP_PYTHON=python3
cmake --build build -j 8 --target cm0102_recomp

The first command checks each file against tools/clean_files/manifest.tsv and stops on any difference. The tool needs bsdtar and unshield. The build needs CMake 3.20, a C compiler, Python 3 with capstone, and SDL2. tools/release/make_release.sh makes the Mac, Windows and Linux downloads.

Open an issue. For a problem, say which computer you use, which version of the game, and what you clicked before it happened.

For a problem with the picture or the window, such as blurred text or a picture that stays small, add the display report. Press Ctrl+Shift+D in the game (Cmd+Shift+D on a Mac). The game copies the report to the clipboard, so you can paste it into the issue or a forum post. It also saves it as display-report.txt in the save folder. The report lists your system, your screens and their scale, and how the game scales its picture. It does not include your account name. Many features came from players on Reddit, and the release notes credit each one.

• Sports Interactive made Championship Manager 01/02, and Eidos published it and made it free in 2008.
• u/gundenaf on Reddit asked for the Linux version, the database choice, the polygon analyser, the HD layout and the attribute groups.
• The CM 01/02 Update Team at champman0102.co.uk makes the yearly databases. The download includes 21 of them, for the seasons that do not use the official data or our own Summer 2002, 2004 and 2006 databases.

The Bosman Edition is an unofficial fan project. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Sports Interactive, SEGA, Eidos or Square Enix. Championship Manager is a trademark of Square Enix. The downloads include the game files from the 2008 free release.

From 0.6.0 the code in this repository is released under the GNU General Public License v3.0. Releases up to 0.5.0 were released under CC0 1.0. The licence covers only the code written for this project. It does not cover the original game, its data, its logo or the Update Team databases, which belong to their owners.

The function map (docs/research/function-map/) and the data map (docs/research/data-map/) are under CC BY 4.0, as in their own repository, cm0102-function-map.