Hello everyone, up until now a few of you might have been having a little bit of a problem rating your favourite games using the star rating down the right hand side of each game page? this was caused by a CSS glitch that prevented the stars from rendering correctly and could even have prevented you from voting entirely (depending on your choice of browser). I`m happy to say that at long last this has now been fixed and you should get an accurate star rating for each of the thousands of game pages and be able to vote for your favourite and least favourite Amstrad titles.

Oh and this feature is as always reserved for members of the website only. So if you want to post a comment or rate your favourite / least favourite titles accordingly you will need to head on over to the forums and register an account.

Enjoy.

Hello everyone, hope you had a good Christmas break, pitty that most of us are back at work, college or some form of school again soon (if not already) though isn`t it? Why can`t you just relive your youth over and other again?

Anyway the comments system is back in a trial mode and is obviously only available to registered members of the site. You will be able to post comments on all of your favourite Amstrad CPC classics as well as give them your own personal rating out of 10. The reason I say trial mode is because, should the system become infiltrated with spam then it will once again go back offline to give me chance to clean it all out and edit the software again to combat such abuse. It is also nowhere near 100% complete as there are numerous things I want to add to this feature that will help me maintain the site and watch for rubbish such as adverts for viagra or dating websites and things like that.

You cannot delete your comment once posted. So please do make sure that you WANT to comment on the game you are looking at before clicking the button. You can however edit your comment at a later date and even post more than one comment if you feel the need to reply to someone elses earlier comment (these are also numbered for your convenience). We of course CAN delete your comment and block you from posting any future comments so please keep it clean and just enjoy the website.

In addition to this I`ve been cleaning up the Gamebase a little bit, still a LOAD to do on that front. Mainly the synopsis for games is being ignored by Google and I suspect it is due to the fact that it is not wrapped in nice paragraph tags on older entries, looks fine on screen but not so great to a robot. So that is my first priority. While I`m looking at that I`m also sorting out any misnamed titles and using the "Also known as" box to place any additional names for that title into, so for example Terminator 2 : Judgement Day is also just known as Terminator 2 or even T2, so when you search for either of those 3 combinations you will get the Terminator 2 game. Nice things like that. I`m also clearly marking the GX4000 entries in bold text and removing the word "Cartridge" from the title of those games, just looks cleaner. You can still find any GX4000 title by simply typing GX4000 into the search box because again I have used the "Also known as" box to get around this.

That`s it for now. More surprise updates coming soon though.

Gamebase CPC works closely with websites that offer a similar service for different classic computers (ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and the Amiga) by directly linking to pages for any particular title. What does that mean? well for example if you were viewing the Amstrad version of Batman The Movie you would be able to click a button and instantly be taken to the Spectrum, C64 or Amiga version via external websites.

Anyway with thanks to Kim Lemon, I have just updated the C64 and Amiga database with a fresh set of links to 1300+ games, so if your favourite Amstrad classic was coming up as "not available on the C64 or Amiga" then there`s a big chance it will now be available.

Just thought I would keep you all updated, carry on.

One of those things that has been "long time coming" over the past few months is an updated version of the Mozilla Firefox search plugin for our Gamebase, well ladies and gents it is now online and ready for use, download it here.

To install download our zip file via the link above and extract inside your "Mozilla Firefox/searchplugins" directory. Close your browser and then re-open it. Now in the drop down menu in the top left corner of your screen you should be able to select "GameBase CPC" and search for any game via the toolbar. If you already have this plugin installed and it appears to be working fine already then you do not need this update, this simply fixes the "no results found" error when searching for games.

Note Firefox 2.0 or higher is required for this plugin to work correctly. You can download the Firefox browser (which kicks Internet Explorer 7 in the nuts by the way) here.

Update : Fixed the link. Sorry.

Important - Gamebase is no longer crashing PHPBB after our members visit a title page. It appears that our cookie system was conflicting with PHPBB and therefore generating a rather nasty "Hack Attempt" error message and kicking you out of the forum. It will not allow you back into the forum until you remove your CPC Zone cookies, to do this:

Firefox

• Click Tools > Options > Cookies > View Cookies
• Select cpczone.net
• Click Remove Cookies
• Refresh the website

IE

• Click Tools > Internet Options
• Under "Temporary Internet Files" click Delete Cookies
• Refresh the website

If you are using any other browser, please go to the option pages and locate the function for removing cookies from your PC. This has been tried and tested by myself and site operator Sarah Johnson and it does work fine again now.

Important : CPC Zone has recently come under attack from spammers and most recently, hackers. Because of this we have been forced to upgrade our old Invision Powered forum to the very latest build of PHPBB. This has led to various problems throughout the site and I have been working flat-out all night in an attempt to fix these issues.

It would appear that right now the comment section of Gamebase needs to be disabled so that the rather stupid "Hack attempt!" message by PHPBB does not stop you from browsing the news and indeed the forum at what appears to be very random intervals. The comment section may return at a later date (I will keep you posted) but for now there will be no options for rating or commenting on your favourite/most hated titles in the Gamebase section of CPC Zone. I truly am sorry about that.

Cannot access the forums? : If you cannot access the forums and the "Hack attempt!" message is displayed, please delete your cookies and then refresh the page. Instructions for doing this can be found with a quick search on Google, though I`m sure most of you know how to do this. You will be asked to login to the forums, your username and password is the same as that in which you used to gain access to the previous forum.

Thats it for now, I`m off to bed.

Hello people! Okay, I just made a few slight changes to the Gamebase software with more to come and much more in development. The changes are as follows:

• Page clicks have been edited to stop the system from updating the popularity of a game on each refresh and SHOULD help decrease the load on the server.
• Game comments look a little tidier now, I`ve added some little stars to your ratings and cleaned up the submission forms.
• User Profile pages have been fixed, previously they appeared broken due to the layout changes. Previously this page listed ALL of the titles you had voted for and the scores you gave, to help reduce the server load this page will now *ONLY* show the last 30 entries.
• Users Overall Votes has been removed, there appears to be an odd math problem which was probably caused by a bad SQL entry. I need to investigate that later (no big deal as your ratings are in the comments section and profile page anyway).

And last but not least the Welcome to Amsoft and Mini Office entries now contain screen shots (courtesy of ADATE). Until next time, tata.

I`ve just added a further 32 entries to the ever expanding Gamebase system, these are mainly applications and as such not something you can play on, but our aim is to cover as much software as we can so there you go.

The software has also been slightly updated, you can now view the artwork for the game you are viewing by clicking the thumbnails under "Game Data" and the profile section has been switched from a full page to a pop-up that allows you to click through all the titles that the person/company has created without ever losing the profile page. Best way to explain it is for you to go and check it out.

Last but not least, you may have noticed the subtle changes in colour and the slightly altered header. I wasn`t happy with the last colours we used and think the new colours are more relaxing on the eye. Obviously there are other changes such as the donation box and design tweaks but there`s not a lot of point in going through those and boring the crap out of you. Enjoy!

Hello people, April is here and I figured I had better get something new on the old website, so here it is, a new version of Gamebase. Well, I say new, it`s pretty much the same online software but now includes:

• New Synopsis data for more titles
• New entries
• New image viewing script (funky lightbox, oooh)
• Over 200 online instructions for classic titles (more to come)
• Direct links to the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amiga versions of other a thousand titles (thanks to Kim and Martijn)

Now if that doesn`t sound like enough of a jump start, I don`t know what does. Enjoy :)

It`s worth noting that the CPC community is still looking for that dedicated coder to come along and develop an offline version of this service in a similar way to Lemonade and Gamebase for the C64, if you`re interested in giving it a shot, check out the forums.

Hello people, long time again, I know.

But I wanted to let you all know that I am currently working on a hell of a lot of new features for the Gamebase system. The include a first batch of over 300 instructions for the thousands of games, more synopsis and background stories for games that have none and even more sources of information for your favourite games via the Gamebase 64 project. A website similar to CPC Zone that lists thousands of games for the Commodore 64.

I`m also planning some visual changes (not big ones) and quite a lot more in the coming weeks. So there you have it, I`m not sitting on my butt doing nothing and I`m continuing to make Gamebase CPC your one stop spot for CPC gaming and application info!

As we mentioned in earlier news posts, both CPC Zone and World of Spectrum have come together to combine the awesome levels of information found on both sites and allow you to quickly jump between the Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum versions of matching entries.

For example, if you search for Dizzy on this site, underneath the "Game Data" menu you should also find a link that goes directly to the World of Spectrum page for that game. Likewise if you are navigating World of Spectrum you should also find a link that will take you directly to our pages. To me at least, this is a good idea and if any Commodore 64 resource (Gamebase 64, Lemon64 etc) would like to do the same thing then please do get in touch.