A2G-Trainer

A trainer for Anstoss 2 Gold, tested and compatible with both the original CD release and the GOG version. Built specifically to run even on legacy systems. Tested working from Windows XP SP3 x86 onwards, including all Windows OS versions until Windows 11 x64.

📸 Screenshots

Main view — squad list & player details	Team choice — own squad, next opponent, dynamic team	Club view — finances & stadium block overview
Stadium editor — seats, roof, construction time	Youth players — skills editor (Jugendspieler)	Coach view — competencies & difficulty

🛠 Features

• ✅ Live memory editing of Anstoss 2 Gold
• ✅ Edit all players and amateurs of any club
• ✅ Edit player attributes, positions and skills
• ✅ Supports multiplexed bitfields (skills etc.)
• ✅ Edit your youth players (Jugendspieler)
• ✅ Player renames persist permanently (same length as the old name. See Tips below)
• ✅ Runs on Windows XP (built against .NET Framework 4.0)
• ✅ Club editing (name, finances, stadium details)
• ✅ Stadium editor with up to 2 × 32,767 seats per block
• ✅ Freeze condition & freshness in the Team tab so they stay fixed while you play
• ✅ Multi-trainer (hot-seat) support
• ✅ Coach editing (level, age, difficulty, and stocks)
• ✅ Main country plus up to 4 additional countries for a career
• ✅ Automatic reconnect & turn-handoff detection: It detects a game restart, a different savegame being loaded, or a hot-seat turn passing
• ✅ Help section integrated into the UI, also available as the online Projektseite
• ✅ Clean WinForms UI with tabbed views and menu navigation
• ✅ Modular MVC architecture
• ✅ Portable version

🧩 Dependencies

To run the trainer

• On Windows XP, make sure .NET Framework 4.0 is installed.
• On Windows 11, no additional installation is necessary.

To build/test from source

• Visual Studio 2019+ (Community is fine) with the .NET desktop development workload, or the standalone Build Tools for Visual Studio with the same workload. Either gives you the full MSBuild toolchain this project needs. See the note in Testing below on why the plain dotnet SDK CLI can't build it end-to-end.
• The .NET SDK (8.0 or newer). Used to run already-built tests and to drive the dotnet test/coverage commands below. CI uses 8.0.x.
• No manual .NET Framework 4.0 Developer/Targeting Pack install is needed for the main project. Microsoft.NETFramework.ReferenceAssemblies supplies those via NuGet automatically on restore.
• The A2G-Trainer-XP.Tests project targets .NET Framework 4.7.2, which needs that version's Reference Assemblies installed which are included by the ".NET desktop development" VS workload above, so no extra step if you have that.

🚀 Run Instructions

1. Launch A2G-Trainer-XP.exe and start Anstoss 2 Gold; either order works.
2. Load your savegame. The tool detects the game automatically and reconnects on its own after a game restart or when you load a different savegame.
3. Use the Tool Strip to switch to the club view (finances, stadium, etc.) or edit other teams.

💡 Tips & Hints

• To assign a negative number of seats to a stadium block, enter any value greater than 32,767.
• After editing a stadium block, Block A is automatically set to one week construction time to ensure all changes are persisted.
• A player rename only survives a save/reload if the new name has the exact same number of characters as the old one. A different length still shows correctly until the next Tagesabschluss/load, but isn't saved permanently: you'll get a warning naming the player if that happens. Details land in %LocalAppData%\A2G-Trainer-XP\trainer.log.

🔧 Build Instructions

1. Open the solution in Visual Studio 2019
2. Ensure the target framework is .NET Framework 4.0
3. Build the project (Release|x86 recommended for XP). There's also a Release2007CD|x86 configuration for the original 2007 CD release, which uses GOG-style memory addressing despite not running via run.exe.
4. Optional: run the test suite (see Testing below) to verify core logic before building a release
5. Building from the CLI instead of Visual Studio? See the note under Testing. A plain dotnet build fails on this project, use msbuild as shown there.

🧪 Testing

The A2G-Trainer-XP.Tests project (xUnit) covers the memory-reading/writing logic and, for the WinForms views, the actual controls. None of it needs the game running.

Visual Studio

• Test → Test Explorer, then Run All Tests.
• Coverage: Enterprise has Test → Analyze Code Coverage for All Tests built in. On Community/Professional, install the free Fine Code Coverage extension, or use the CLI steps below.

VS Code

• Install the C# Dev Kit extension, then use the Testing panel (flask icon) to discover and run tests.
• Coverage: run the CLI steps below, then install Coverage Gutters to show results inline in the editor.

CLI

Plain dotnet build/dotnet test fails outright on this project (MSB3822/MSB3823, about Trainer.resx's binary resources needing System.Resources.Extensions), because the dotnet SDK's own MSBuild handles this legacy .NET Framework 4.0 project's resources differently than full Visual Studio MSBuild does. Build with msbuild first, then run the already-built tests with dotnet test --no-build (this is exactly what .github/workflows/release.yml does in CI):

msbuild A2G-Trainer-XP.Tests/A2G-Trainer-XP.Tests.csproj /t:Restore,Build /p:Configuration=Debug
dotnet test A2G-Trainer-XP.Tests/A2G-Trainer-XP.Tests.csproj --no-build --no-restore

For coverage, add the collector once and pass the same flag to that build:

dotnet add A2G-Trainer-XP.Tests package coverlet.collector
msbuild A2G-Trainer-XP.Tests/A2G-Trainer-XP.Tests.csproj /t:Restore,Build /p:Configuration=Debug
dotnet test A2G-Trainer-XP.Tests/A2G-Trainer-XP.Tests.csproj --no-build --no-restore --collect:"XPlat Code Coverage"

# turn the raw XML into a browsable report (one-time tool install)
dotnet tool install -g dotnet-reportgenerator-globaltool
reportgenerator -reports:"A2G-Trainer-XP.Tests/TestResults/**/coverage.cobertura.xml" -targetdir:coveragereport -reporttypes:Html

Open coveragereport/index.html for a per-file/method/line breakdown.

msbuild here means the full Visual Studio MSBuild, not the one bundled with the dotnet SDK; make sure the one on your PATH resolves there (a "Developer Command Prompt for VS" or a machine with only VS installed gets this right automatically; run where msbuild if unsure).

A handful of tests self-attach to the running test process to exercise real memory reads/writes safely, without a live game - this needs the test host running as x86 (already set up in the project). The WinForms-view tests additionally spin up real controls on a background STA thread.

Visual Studio's and VS Code's test runners build the project their own way and don't hit this issue. The CLI workaround above is only needed when driving the build from a terminal.

Extras

Included in this repository is an updated Cheat Engine table originally created by strajk- for the original version of Anstoss 2 Gold. Each release also ships a GOG-addressed variant of the same table (*-GOG.ct), generated automatically from the original by scripts/Convert-CtToGog.ps1.

Credits

Thanks to the anstoss-juenger.de community, especially strajk-. Some code fragments and ideas were taken from his A2G-RTE project. Many thanks to 22 for his efforts and assistance in finding any detail of the game in the memory.

🛡 Disclaimer

This tool directly accesses game memory. Use at your own risk.
This project is not affiliated with Ascaron or the developers of Anstoss 2 Gold.