Front Office Football Nine Documentation

• Can I import a saved game from Front Office Football Eight or an earlier version into Front Office Football Nine?

The games use a completely different file structure for saved games. Front Office Football Nine tracks much more information about players and teams and uses a different geographical database.

• Can I join a multi-player league or play “hot-seat” with more than one team controlled?

Front Office Football Nine only allows control over one designated team, which doesn't change after a new universe is formed. It's possible future products will feature a multi-player option, but no control-changing mechanism was developed for Front Office Football Nine. Adding one, along with multi-player features designed to work with the game's database, would require several months. It's not something that could be considered for an update.

• Are there future Front Office Football products in development?

The market will decide this question.

• Are past versions of Solecismic Software products still available?

Front Office Football Seven and Eight are also available, only on Steam. They are in maintenance mode, which means no new development will take place on these versions. Earlier versions of the game, as well as The College Years (last updated in 2004), are not available for sale and might not even work on Windows 10/11.

• Can I request new features for Front Office Football Nine?

The game is complete, and development focus will be on maintenance (fixing bugs) and future products. But any suggestions will be considered for future products.

• A feature I liked was in Front Office Football Eight, but not in Front Office Football Nine. Why?

Front Office Football Nine uses a completely new database and was rewritten from the ground up. It's a new design. While many features and concepts were rewritten for the new game, some were not and would have required significant development time to implement.

• Is there a Mac/LINUX version of Front Office Football?

Front Office Football is a Windows product. The interface is based on a Microsoft product called Microsoft Foundation Classes. There are emulators out there that can handle this type of product, but we can't guarantee they handle it perfectly nor can we recommend one or help set it up. There is no native version for these operating systems and no plan to create one.

• Can I run Front Office Football Nine on a smart phone, tablet or other device, like Steam Deck?

Front Office Football Nine can't be converted to run on a mobile device operating system, which rules out phones and most tablets. It might run on other devices, but the user interface is designed for a full-sized monitor and that might reduce what you can do. Steam Deck is based on an emulator that replaces Microsoft Foundation Classes. Customers have reported some display issues with past products that indicate that it doesn't replace them in the same manner in all cases, and not all functions are available.

• How long can I run my universe?

This depends on the RAM in your computer. Front Office Football Nine is designed to keep simulating seasons. But it uses a lot of RAM, which keeps the simulation fast. The trade-off is that there's no real warning when the game needs to do something and it can't find the memory to do it. You'll see a memory exception and the game will stop running. In most cases, you can restart the game from the last save and you might get further, you might not. But you're running up against memory limits in that case and it will probably happen again. Closing other programs (especially browsers) will help - it might help considerably. It's not that you don't have “enough” RAM, but that a data structure was trying to reserve contiguous space in RAM and there wasn't a free block large enough for the request. In testing with 16G RAM, we've used stable universes containing more than 250 completed seasons.

• Text doesn't quite fit in some charts or on all screens. Is there something I can do?

Front Office Football Nine can be sized to run in a window or full screen. The size of the display determines how much room there is for specific screen elements. In order to provide more flexibility, screens were designed with a smaller font as the default (Calibri size 11). But you can choose larger or smaller fonts. If you like, you can change the default font on the Global Settings screen. Choose a font that doesn't cause display issues on any screen. You can't change the fields displayed on any chart.

• I would like to customize the data files (.csv files) but I don't know where to start?

Your installation folder contains a folder called default_data. This folder contains a text file called overview.txt. That's the introduction to data customization. Most customization efforts are very complex and unless you are experienced with database work, there's going to be a steep learning curve. Make backups of the original files and restore them if you find you're unable to create a new universe with your new settings. In addition, this documentation contains an entry on Customization, and introduces a second topic, Data File Customization, which contains information about the data files along with specific instructions for the most common change.

• Can I also edit the .dat files in a saved game?

Editing these files might cause instability with your universe. We do not provide documentation for these files, nor can we guarantee that we won't need to change the structure and/or format of these files with an update.

• When starting the game or a new universe, I receive a message indicating that a file is not found, or header information is missing or incorrect. What can I do?

This is an indication that a data file Front Office Football requires to set up its database isn't where it needs to be or is in the wrong format. It's likely that this problem will be fixed by reinstalling the game. If you've been working on customization, you might be able to fix the problem by continuing to edit that particular file, or reverting it back to its original form.

• I've installed the game from Steam, but receive an error message when I try and start the game. What happened?

Steam handles the installation process. The mostly likely problem is a virus-checker and a false positive. You might need to temporarily turn off your virus-checker or even white-list the game within your virus-checker in order to have it run. Some virus-checkers are optimized for speed and generate a lot of false positives. If this doesn't solve the problem, you can try right-clicking on the shortcut to the game, viewing Properties and run the game as Administrator. If that doesn't work, you'll receive a better answer by contacting Steam directly, as it's the Steam installation itself that's failing.

• How do I call the plays for games myself rather than having each game simulated using the game plans?

There is a checkbox on the schedule screens - “Show/Control Your Team's Games”. If that box is checked, each game involving your team will start with the simulation screen and you can call each play yourself or let your staff call plays. This is not available for games not involving your team, but you can see the full replay for any game through the Gamebook.