CM 97/98 How to install CM97/98

Hopefully reading this blog has whetted your appetite to re-live this great game. As it is, computers have come quite a long way since 1997 which can make playing the game on a modern laptop/computer a bit tricky. But there is a way. Of course, please download with discretion and I take no responsibility for the downloads hosted on external websites. Click here to download the game as I have uploaded it.

DosBox is the key to getting this game to work – basically this emulates MS-Dos on your computer to allow you to run old Dos Games. Download it from their website here by picking the correct operating system from the list. Get that installed and that’s the easy bit done.

I’ve split the guide into firstly Windows instuctions and further down the page is Mac. Incidentally, we’ve had somebody get it working on an Android phone/tablet. There’s a guide for that here. We have nothing for iPad yet, I know you can share your screen from your laptop to your tablet but that’s not really the same.

Windows

You’ll need the game to make any of this happen. If you’re fortunate enough to own the CD still, treasure it but unless your laptop is old it will be of little use here. Download the game as per the link above (other downloads are available).

Once you’ve got the game on your laptop, you can try and run it by double clicking cm2.exe from the folder but it will most likely either not load at all or will load with colours all over the shop. You can try playing about with the compatibility settings, but they tend not to work.

There are two ways to get the game to work. Firstly, if this is the only game you play on dosbox then drag the desired exe file (cm2e8 or cm2e16) onto the Dosbox icon. That should work, but if it doesn’t, read on.

Plan B is to use Dosbox. Open up Dosbox by double clicking the exe file you installed earlier. At this point, I encourage you to review this article:

http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Basic_Setup_and_Installation_of_DosBox

I’m not a technical expert by any means but if the above makes no sense to you, I will try and explain it. If you can, move the CM9798 folder somewhere simple, such as C: (without putting it in any other folder). Place the CM9798 files in there.

Windows

In dosbox, it will say Z:\> and after this you should type mount c C:\cm9798

So the whole line should read: Z:\> mount c c:\cm9798       Then press enter

Of course if you have cm9798 folder saved elsewhere, change the file path to that. If successful, dosbox will add a line that says Drive C is mounted as the local directory C:\cm9798

Now type C: and press enter. This should change the Z to a C, and you’ll be left with this:

Type in the program you want to run, here are your options:

cm2.exe – Will run the whole game, then you decide if you want to run 8 bit (1 league) or 16 bit (3 leagues), or the database editor

Cm2e16.exe – Runs the full game, with 3 playable leagues

Cm2e18.exe – Runs the one league version

Cme2ed – Runs the database editor

Press enter after you’ve typed in one of the above and it will run.

Mac

You’ll still need Dosbox for Mac which can be found on this page. Download DosBox & save to your applications folder. Go to your home folder (the folder that has the same name as your username). I believe there are other emulators available.

You should still be able to download/buy the game as per my link above, you don’t have to do anything different to if you were running it on a Windows machine.

If you’ve followed the earlier steps, you should have a folder in your home folder called dosgames & within that a folder called CM9798 & all the game files in that

launch DosBox and type the following:

mount c ~/dosgames

Press return and the enter:

C: (press enter)

cd cm9798

press enter again and then finally type:

launch.exe

Press enter and the game will launch.

April 2020 – There seems to have been an update to Mac which has caused some problems so if you’ve recently updated to Catalina and have issues, that’ll be why.

Extra – This next bit isn’t required but more of a tip.

Now, obviously you won’t want to go through this whole process each time, so if you’re only going to run the one Dos game you can tell dosbox to do this every time. Rather than re-write what has already been written elsewhere, please refer to the below extract from http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Basic_Setup_and_Installation_of_DosBox

I hope you find this article useful, I didn’t invent this process and there may be other ways of running the game, but this works well for me.

Please tweet any queries to @cm9798 and I’ll try and help

With thanks to my life long friend _markreynolds for the mac instructions – visit his website http://markreynolds.co for some tech insight and fantastic photography