First post, by Aminta
A long time ago - in 2004 - in a galaxy far, far away, where the Internet was only just leaving behind the sound of the modem, artificial intelligence was the stuff of science fiction novels and video games were sold in elegant cardboard boxes in shops, yours truly - together with Ali Erdinc Koroglu, Jan Wickberg, Martin Binet, Zlatko Karakas, Ross Mayhew and Steve Smith - founded the Swos Working Group (https://web.archive.org/web/20040831085727/ht … os.erdinc.info/) in honour of our all-time favourite video game: the 1996-1997 edition of Sensible World of Soccer. We were driven by a dream: to make that game even better by adding a few competitions whose absence we felt especially keenly. The Italian Serie C (split into C1 and C2), where players who would later become international stars, such as Simone Inzaghi and Gianluca Zambrotta, were playing, and the South American cups, above all the legendary Copa Libertadores, which, in an age when football on TV was still a novelty and far from plentiful, held for us the charm of exotic, faraway things. We would have loved to play these competitions above all in career mode, the SWOS players' absolute favourite: partly because in season mode and in the preset competitions we had already managed to add them, in a new edition of SWOS that was going to be called Swos 2024. The work was done by reverse engineering and hex editing; I remember the thrill of discovering the routines that add competitions, but also the bitter frustration of not being able to make them work in career mode, which would freeze every time. Today, in the year of grace 2026, I wanted to settle the score with this personal story that never left me over these two decades: the regret of having come close to a dream and never quite making it. After all, I told myself in an attempt at consolation, I ended up becoming a web and mobile developer; reverse engineering 1996 x86 code had already been a miracle, and hardly any of the many modern modders had managed the feat.
Today, thanks to AI, which has changed the very idea of programming forever, the feat is accomplished: you can now download the patch that adds, in every language of the game, Serie C1 and C2 to the Italian league, with the original squads of the time, and above all adds, for South America, the Copa Libertadores, the CONMEBOL and the Supercopa, with the entry rules of the day. And, as the icing on the cake, the Intercontinental Cup could not be missing. What matters to me, though, is not only the result but also the explanation of how we got there through AI. So here we publish, in English and Italian, the complete documentation of the method followed to create the patches, which finally revealed to me what we had not understood back in 2004, and which I hope will inspire other developers and lovers of the most beautiful video game in the world to expand its career mode even further. An immense thank you to the work of Zlatko Karakas, whose fundamental disassembly of the original executable I found after so many years of absence (https://github.com/zlatkok/swos-port).
This patch is dedicated to the memory of Steve Smith, an extraordinary compiler of updated squads for SWOS, who left us far too soon. And to everyone who hopes to see, sooner or later, a dream come true, even one that has lasted 22 years…
— Davide Lorigliola
What the patch adds
- Italy with 4 divisions: Serie A, B, C1 and C2 with the real 1996-97 clubs, squads and coaches, no end-of-season freeze.
- Copa Libertadores, Supercopa and Copa CONMEBOL in menus, world view and career mode, with qualifiers from the South American standings.
- Intercontinental Cup in December, Champions Cup winner vs Libertadores winner, updated every season and saved with the career.
- All four executables of the CD: ENGLISH, ITALIAN, FRENCH and GERMAN.
Download: https://github.com/aminta/swos-9697-mod/releases/latest (a single HTML page: open it in a browser, drop your original executable and DATA\TEAM.020, download the patched files; it contains only differences, so you need the original game)
Technical manual: https://aminta.github.io/swos-9697-mod/
Source and tools: https://github.com/aminta/swos-9697-mod
Forum thread: https://sensiblesoccer.de/forum/pc/27756-swos … continental-cup
GOG version: supported. GOG's executables differ from the CD by 2 bytes (a fixed national cup date); the patcher recognises both and keeps GOG's fix.
