In the mid 90s, Italian football was all the rage. Channel 4’s coverage of Serie A was beaming football onto terrestrial TV at a time when live football was mostly confined to Sky. The Collyer’s had already launched CM Italia on the original CM engine so once Championship Manager 2 came along in 1995, so too did many versions of Europe’s top leagues.
1995/96 European Leagues
Two CDs, each containing three leagues, were released based on the 1995/96 squads (but the game starts 1/8/96). Only one league could be loaded at a time per CD.
Italian League 96/97
This was sold separately or in some stores as a double with the full 96/97 game, so you had England, Scotland and Italy.
Blog: I blogged this for We Stream FM, it’s a wonderful nostalgia trip. There’s a download available if you Google it and it will run with DosBox in the usual manner.
Championship Manager 2: European Leagues
Along came CM2 European Leagues which includes Italy, Spain, Germany, Holland, Belgium and France as well as the English/Scottish CM2 game. It’s a real mix of 95/96 and 96/97 across the leagues.
Playable Leagues:
France (96/97)
Italy (96/97)
Spain (95/96)
Germany (96/97)
Holland (95/96)
Belgium (95/96)
Notes: The games might be for the 96/97 season but they seem to have the squads from 95/96, for example the AC Milan squad on this version has Di Canio, whereas the standalone 96/97 release did not but did have Edgar Davids, as one example.
Also there are two Ronaldo’s at PSV (also on the 95/96 three league release) – one is Dutch, one is Brazilian, neither have the right date of birth. Don’t let that put you off though.
Instructions: All of the above come on one CD and you have to install one at a time. Each installs to it’s own folder and I won’t lie, it’s a massive pain in the arse.
If you do have the CD, you can install games from the CD using Dosbox. As you need the CD to run the game it means that every time you want to play any of the leagues you’ve installed you need to mount the CD Drive and then also the game you’ve installed. You can of course add this to the Dosbox options so it does it automatically. There’s a great guide for mounting a CD drive here.
I will try and talk you through this process as best I can – this should apply to any DOS game from a CD, this one is just more complicated.
You need to mount two things. First, the CD drive. Most CD drives will be either D or E, you can check by looking at the My PC (Old money: My Computer) section on your laptop/pc. Mine is the E drive so I’ve mounted it by typing:
mount e e:\ -t cdrom -ioctl
From my investigation, it’s important you mount this to the same letter as your disk drive, though take everything I say with a pinch of salt.
Anyway, you next need to mount a folder where you want your game to install to. It took me a while to get my head around this but just go with it. I made a folder in my C drive called Champ, remember this for later. Again, I think it’s important you mount this to the C drive which I will explain when we get there.
mount c C:\Champ\
Please note to save yourself typing these in each time, you can add them to the Dosbox “Command Lines” which can be found in your start menu under Dosbox and then Dosbox options. Here’s a snippet of mine (the d entry is just my CM9798 file and not required here)
What I need to do is install the game. In the vast majority of cases, you might only have one thing to install from a CD but the European Leagues have 6, each one has to be installed separately (annoyed grunt)
Anyway, once you’ve done the mounting we need to install the game from the CD. To do that, we switch the drive to E by typing e: and then run the exe, in this case it is install (Tip: It will nearly always be “install” or “setup” but you can have a look by going to your CD drive in file explorer.)
Hit enter after install. Things will happen depending on how your game needs to be installed.
European Leagues has multiple choices of game to install, I will choose Italian by typing C
This loads up and we all get very nostalgic.
To my understanding, this is why we had to mount the CD drive to the right letter earlier as it is the source drive here. In an earlier attempt I used a letter other than C and it installed to that letter, which doesn’t exist. What it does do though is it will install to the folder you mounted on the C drive much earlier on, so when mine completes I find it in the Champ folder:
Which is ideal. To run the game going forwards, again it might not be as complicated as this multi league nightmare but here we go. In my case, the mounting is done automatically as I added them to Dosbox options so I change it to the C drive and then pick a folder from within the Champ folder by typing “cd <folder name>” so in this case cd cm2_ITY
Then you type the name of the exe and press enter – in this case cm2
Remember you’ll need to have the CD in every time you want to play the game going forwards.
Championship Manager 2 Scandinavian Leagues
This version wasn’t released in the UK but it contains three Scandinavian leagues. Like the European Leagues, you have to install each one individually and can only run one at a time.
Playable Leagues: All divisions from Norway, Sweden and Denmark
Notes: Each league is a separate install, only one loaded per save. Norway is the 1996 season, which runs April to October.
Championship Manager Fans 