This is my rewrite of Kevin Toms' famous Spectrum Football Manager.

Now you can recreate those youthful days spent screaming at
your Sinclair Spectrum. All the time aware it made precisely no difference.

For those of you not of that age, this is a very simple, but immense fun
(IMO) Soccer management game, with stick-man highlights. Take it not only
from me, but from Spectrum fans everywhere, the original was a work of
genius. It is not that it is wildly accurate, or even sensible in places.
It is not gorgeous to look at. It is not ultra realistic. It does not have
masses of options.

It is just immense fun.

My personal view is this is down to the simplicity. You don't spend hours
training, setting up formations, all that stuff. You just play the game.

This program is a port of the Allegro version released in December 2001
and requires SDL 1.2 or better. It also includes the promotion bug fix
often noted by users of the early version of FM.

If you have scale 1 (e.g. 320x256 console) it mimics the Speccy font
perfectly ; if you use a larger font it uses my autoscaling semi-rounded
bitmaps in font.c. They aren't truetype but they are fast and easy and
low resource and look quite nice. Feel free to nick them.

The teams and players are as at the original release date of 20 years ago.
However, they can be changed and expanded if you wish. This file, called
game.dat is normally in /usr/share/fm directory (installed by default).
However a local file in the cwd will overrule it.

Sorry some of it is a bodge, I put it together under DOS/Windows (sorry for
foul language) so it was a bodge by default :)

There are no real instructions. It's not difficult, pick your teams, follow
the prompts....

Saved games are saved in the directory it is run from. Must fix that :)

If you are not in the slightest bit interested in football, the option is
there to play as Manchester Utd. I bravely (IMO) resisted the temptation to
code it so they never ever score :)

If anyone is so minded, they could draw me some nice footballers in 8x8
16x16 and 24x24 sizes , shirts in each of the basic colours. OTOH, the
stickmen do give it a certain je ne sais quoi (that's culture ya know).

Paul Robson, February 2003.

Incidentally, you may have noticed Swansea in Div.1 (would now be the
premiership). This is a true story. I was watching the game show "Mr and
Mrs" and a couple appeared, the male half being a Swansea fan. He had
told his Girlfriend he would marry her when Swansea reached Div.1 (they
were then languishing in Div. 4). They promptly won every game in
sight for the next three years, got promoted, briefly topped Div.1, then
went straight back down again. Teach him to keep his trap shut ;-)