CM 01/02 Regen Notes Tool

A Windows tool for Championship Manager 01/02 that identifies which of your current players are regens of original players, and writes the original name into each regen's in-game Notes directly in the .sav without launching the game.

It's the same idea as the community's Generated Player Finder (GPF2/GPF3), rebuilt from scratch as a single double-click .exe with the source in the open.

How it works

1. On day one of a new save, take a snapshot (Career.sav.rnw) — one record per player.dat slot: the occupant's name plus CA and PA.
2. Later, the tool compares the live save to that snapshot. player.dat slots are fixed for the life of a save, so a slot whose current occupant's name differs from its day-one name is holding a regen — and the day-one name is who they replaced. The slot number is the link; there's no attribute-fingerprint guessing. On the reference save it rediscovers every known regen (Messi, Ronaldo, Lewandowski, etc).
3. Filter by minimum PA (of the current player — the same thing GPF2's "potential >=" button does), or by name.
4. Export the list to CSV, and/or write each original name into its regen's Notes tab.

What it does that the older tools don't

• Writes the results back into the save. GPF2/GPF3 only show you a list; this annotates every regen's in-game Notes for you, offline, in one pass without renaming the player itself.
• Reads GPF2's .gpf2 directly. If you already snapshot with GPF2 this is backward compatible with your old files. It also has its own .rnw file format snapshot, which additionally stores CA and PA, plus each player's nation as an index into nation.dat — nothing reads the nation yet, it's just captured as additional assistance for later.
• CSV export that opens cleanly in Excel. Specifically formatted as UTF-8 with BOM, so accented names ("Tchouaméni", "Müller", etc.) aren't mojibaked.
• Shows Player ID and Staff ID. The player.dat index and the staff.dat id to allow for reverse lookups to other editors and tools.
• Shows the regen's current club and nationality (the 3-letter code — ENG, POL, …) — so you can spot the ones at your own club, or from a nation you're scouting.
• Accent-insensitive search. Searching for "Aurelien" finds "Aurélien".
• Safe writes. Temp-file-plus-atomic-replace, optional timestamped backup, and a warning if CM01/02 is running to prevent Note overwrites. Byte-for-byte integrity checked against 500 MB+ saves.
• Open source (MIT). Plain .exe to be user friendly and nothing hidden about what it's doing to your save.

See docs/HANDOFF.md and docs/gpf2-and-matching.md for the reverse-engineering notes — save format, notes.dat layout, the TStaff / TPlayer structs, the .gpf2 format, and the "No Reminder" sentinel a naïve writer gets wrong.

Safety

The GUI writes into the save you pick (temp file + atomic replace, with a "back up save" checkbox on by default). annotate on the command line defaults to a new output file. Either way the input is only overwritten when you ask for it, and every non-notes.dat block is preserved byte-for-byte. Keep your own backups anyway — this edits an undocumented binary format.

Download

Grab cm0102-regen-notes.exe from the latest release and double-click it. No install, no Python.

It's not code-signed. A code-signing certificate isn't feasible for a free one-person project, so on first run Windows SmartScreen will show "Windows protected your PC" — click More info → Run anyway. This is normal for small open-source tools. If Microsoft Defender ever blocks the file outright instead of just warning, that's a false positive — please open an issue.

Each release lists the SHA-256 of the exe so you can verify the download (Get-FileHash cm0102-regen-notes.exe in PowerShell). The build is produced by GitHub Actions from the release tag, so you can also rebuild it yourself and compare.

Usage

Double-click the .exe (or run python -m cm0102_regen_notes.gui from source) for the GUI: pick your save and a regen file (a .gpf2 from GPF2, or a .rnw from Take snapshot now), set the minimum PA, Find Regens, filter by original player / regen / club if you want, then Export CSV… or Write notes to save. Writing goes into the save you picked (with a "back up save" checkbox, on by default, that drops a timestamped copy alongside it); it's done via a temp file + atomic replace so a crash can't corrupt the save.

Command line (from source)

pip install -e .

# on day one of a new save (immediately after the first save), take a baseline:
cm0102-regen-notes snapshot "Career.sav"              # -> Career.sav.rnw
#   ...or just use GPF2's Career.sav.gpf2 if you already run GPF2

# later, after regens have appeared:
cm0102-regen-notes match    "Career.sav" "Career.sav.gpf2" --potential-min 150 --csv regens.csv
cm0102-regen-notes annotate "Career.sav" "Career.sav.gpf2" "Career_annotated.sav" --potential-min 150
cm0102-regen-notes annotate "Career.sav" "Career.sav.gpf2" --in-place --backup --potential-min 150

# low-level helpers:
cm0102-regen-notes list-blocks   "Career.sav"
cm0102-regen-notes dump-notes    "Career.sav"
cm0102-regen-notes extract-block "Career.sav" notes.dat notes.bin
cm0102-regen-notes write-note    "Career.sav" "out.sav" 67524 "Robert Lewandowski"

match and annotate accept either a .gpf2 (from GPF2) or a .rnw (from snapshot) as the day-one baseline. annotate writes to a new OUT_SAVE, or edits SAVE directly with --in-place (add --backup for a timestamped copy first; the write is a temp-file + atomic replace either way). write-note always writes a new file. annotate --dry-run shows what it would write without touching anything.

Development

pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest

tests/test_notes.py and tests/test_match.py are self-contained (they fabricate a format-accurate mini-save via tests/synth.py). tests/verify_real_save.py is a separate, heavier check you point at a real .sav — it writes a note to a temp copy and confirms every other block is byte-for-byte identical afterwards.

Prior art and credit

This project is a clean-room reimplementation. No third-party code is copied in. The save-format understanding was informed by, and cross-checked against, these community projects:

• agevak/CM0102 and agevak/CM0102SaveGameTacticsEditor — C#; source of the initial TStaff / TPlayer / block-table layout (independently re-verified here against real save data). No LICENSE file present, so nothing from them is vendored.
• ChrisReganXP/CMScouter — C#; cross-checked the TPlayer attribute offsets (CA at byte 5, PA at byte 7, etc.) and the staff.dat / player.dat / name-table record sizes against its data classes. Verified against real save data; no code copied.
• GPF / GPF2 / GPF3 (Generated Player Finder) — closed-source; the reference for what regen matching should feel like. We read GPF2's .gpf2 sidecar (a day-one name snapshot) but reimplemented the matching from scratch.
• Regen Cheat (part of JLCollection, by Andrei Yakovenko) — renames regens back in place. This tool deliberately does not do that; it only annotates Notes.
• GK Save Game Editor, CM Explorer — general save-editing prior art.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. The point is that the workings are visible and the tool is free to download; the specific license isn't precious.