CM97/98 was the first game in the series that came with a built-in editor, and as we’ll see over the next few weeks, it opens up endless opportunities for the creative players amongst you. In this article I’ll give you a brief run through of some of the features.
Before we get into the nitty gritty, I must point out there is a notepad file in the CM9798 folder which gives you a detailed run through of how the editor works. I don’t want to re-write that, but it is useful.
To run the editor, fire up dosbox and do what you normally do except instead of cm2e8.exe or cm2e16.exe you need to type cm2ed.exe and hit enter. That’ll launch the editor
Now, before you get ahead of yourself, I’d highly recommend backing up the three databases you can edit. They are:
players.db1
tmdata.db1
mgdata.db1
Click “load database” and type one of the three options above. The editor will load that database. Players is by far the most interesting, that allows you to change who players play for, their stats and so on. Click on edit database.
Most of these are self explanatory. Search records is probably where you will head first, you can free type in there and go to a player you want to edit. View Records will list all the players in a particular order, the default is by Nationality – so players with Albania as their nationality are first. You can change that by using “sort records” if you so desire, that will let you choose to order by another field, such as current club or Ability. This will take quite a while though, and if you wanted to search for all players who played for Arsenal (for example) you could just search for “Arsenal” in the search records box.
Let’s look at editing a player:
You can click on any of the fields to change it. Any position with a 2 is natural and a 1 means they can play there, for example if you’ve ever wondered why Sol Campbell shows up under midfielders on the player search it’s because he has a 1 in there – which is why the computer sometimes plays him as a wing back. All abilities are out of 20, whilst Ability, Reputation and Reputation are out of 200. You can have a player with -1 for potential, which basically means they can be really bloody good if they get lots of game time.
If you want to change the current club, make sure you know the name of the club in the database. That’s a seamless segway into the tmdata.db1 database.
In the above screenshot, I’ve searched for Bolton and you can see in the result, you have the long team name, the reputation and the division. Clicking into the record allows you to change the name, but be careful as if the team is involved in Europe and the database can’t find the team name it will crash.
Page two is where you find the real good stuff.
Here you can change the stadium name and capacity, this is just an exact number and nothing too complicated. Following however is the fan base of a club during an average season measured in 1000s. The formation and style are what the club most commonly uses, whilst cash is the budget available. Again this is entered in 1000s, so 1 Million = 1000. “Essential” means the team is loaded in every version of the game no matter which leagues are loaded. Division allows you to move clubs between divisions, but again there’s a crash risk here if you don’t have the right number of teams in each league. The Home/Away Text means you can change the home/away kit of the team, so if you are Vincent Tan and you fancy making a change, now you can. The colours have codes which you can find by clicking “colours” in the top right.
Several of the fields are for Nations only, which we’ll look at now.
The “EEC Member” box effects which players have “fgn” after their name – 1 means they are European Union members, 0 means they will require a work permit. So, the crafty amongst you can change this over if you are tired of losing players to WP issues. League std is the quality of the league of that nation, 20 being the highest. Nations can also be edited to make every team available to play as, so if you want to manage Brazil you can. There’s no qualifiers, so it’s very dull, but the option is there.
The last section is manager data, which is by far the least itneresting but here we are
The most interesting things are “Motivating Ability” which measures how good a manager is at getting the best out of his players, with 200 being the best. Judgement is how accurately a manager judges a players ability, so if you ever wonder why the AI signs a rubbish player, the odds are his judgement stat is pretty low. Board confidence is out of 100 and measures how secure the manager is in their current job.
That’s all I’ve got. Happy editing and remember to save each database when you’ve finished making changes. Be creative! We’ve got some great database customisations to bring you over the next few weeks, but feel free to send me your own.
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If I remember rightly there was a limit on how much cash a side could have? 60 mil perhaps. Any idea what that figure is?
50 million. Represented as 50000.
Can anyone help me Iam trying to get the editor working for champ man 9798 and having no luck with dos box! What am I doing wrong haha
When your Dos Box program opens, and you can see the ‘DosBox Dos’ option emboldened, click on it twice (I use D-Fend Reloaded to run DOS games) and then type in ‘DZ’ followed by ‘ENTER’. If you click on your CM9798 file from the list, you should see the .EXE named ‘CM2ED’. Of course, this only helps if you’re using D-Fend Reloaded.. but you might consider switching to this program to run CM9798 instead.
Hi Dave, just come across this article. Can you save the players db under a different name? I tried, but the game won’t allow me to select any other db’s to use. Assume I need to save the players.db1 somewhere, then overwrite that in the editor. Then if I want to revert, just find the original file?
Yes that’s right. The game will always load players.db1
Hi,
Thanks for the info. I have created a player in the editor and now it will not load a new game, it gets to the players which is around 19/20% and then crashes. I have checked all the info i have added and it all seems to be fine. Like an idiot i have not backed up the original. Can you help please?
Does it matter if you save the players.db1 in capitals or not?
Cheers
That shouldn’t matter. When it crashes does it throw you back to dos and if so it should give you the error.
Alternatively download the file from the how to section and copy the .db1 files from mine to yours
Hello
I have played through one season and made the end of the season updates so a new season starts. However, when i use the editor all i can find is the players from the Season 1. Furthermore there are some players that i have signed as free transfer and in the editor the players “Current club” is still Free transfer.
Is it possible to see the new players when a new season starts in the editor somehow?
Hi Rob
The editor is pre-game, you would need to find a save game editor to alter in progress games
any way of keeping transfer window open all season?
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I get an error and it crashes out every time after using the editor “invalid away team in league cup”
I had tried adding the 10 Scottish Premiership teams to the English leagues. Everyone left in Scotland got a promotion, including ten non league teams, and I relegated the correct number of English teams so the number of teams in each division didn’t change. I changed the nationality of the 10 Scottish teams to English.
Any idea what I should do? Thanks!
Try importing just one team and see, if that works. First.
English league has been always most difficult to edit or replace, probably because it’s quite central league and most hard-coded. Probably you moved some team that you shouldn’t. I’ve had some success only once with replacing English league, when in unpatched (2.81) version switched with Belgian league(which is meanwhile easiest league to change). Trying same thing with 2.93 ended with crash at season load and with some -1 home or away team in eurocups.
League cup is played between League teams, so it might be connected with Last division, maybe you let some Scottish team with Scottish league past and maybe even places will count. Try to set to SCO teams exact same leagues and places as were on excluded English teams, maybe that helps. Mostly CM2 generation was overall quite tolerant against club numbers changes, but increasing Scottish league crashed game just because of some cup. Another thing you can try is changing teams one by one and testing game after every replaced complect starting with Old Firm clubs as they can be most coded Scottish teams.
Is it possible to add leagues, so Holland or Germany are to play in 4 leagues, just as England?
Take the english league and rename the clubs to German club names…Now you have Germany with 4 divisions.
In CM2 Data Editor tmdata.db1, what does these fields mean and how to activate them?:-
48. Under 21 0
49. B team? 0
50, Essential 1
Is there any way we could directly manage both the main team and their reserves B team?
I’ve accidentally deleted all my data. Can someone please tell me how to get it all back on data editor?? As soon as it gets to loading player data it shuts down. Thanks.
Hi, does anyone know the factors used to decide if a player is more likely to want to join your club?
Increasing the Reputation field in the editor doesn’t seem to help. Are there values in data that can help the attractiveness of a club?
How do you save a database so it doesn’t over ride the original. Or how do you save the original so you can copy and move it and then replace it? Any feedback would be appreciated. Cheers guys!!
what i normally do is before i start editing i save the players.db1 as players.db2. re load .db1 and edit away. when i need everything back to normal ill reload .db2 and save as .db1.
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