sort of...

Forumites with long memories will remember the project to provide a fitting finale to the longest running CPC magazine, Amstrad Action, that totally failed to get off the ground...

... except it didn't. Unbeknown to most, a dedicated team led by Neil Reive continued to work away on the magazine in the background and recently announced that not only was the project not dead and buried, but finished and ready to download!

What they have produced is, in my opinion, a truly remarkable piece of work that both complements and adds to the legacy left by Amstrad Action. A true joy to read for all CPC fans and in particular thos of us who loved the original magazine.

You can download the issue for free from here or you can also buy a printed version for £14.38 + P&P.

Following last year's sale of Amstrad to BSkyB, Sir Alan Sugar has stepped down from his position as chairman of Amstrad.

Sir Alan, however, has no intention of retriring and will instead be focusing his energies on his other businesses as well as his role in the succesful BBC One programme 'The Apprentice' which recently ended it's fourth series. Although Amstrad withdrew support for the CPC range in the early 90s and a large section of the CPC community are critical of Sir Alan personally and his business decisions, it's still worth noting that this is most certainly the end of an era.

German website cpcforever.com appears to have closed down for good.

A bitter blow for the worldwide CPC community and in particular the German scene, cpcforever will be sadly missed.

CPC Zone forum member Devilmarkus is currently attempting to obtain the site's material in the hope of re-opening on a new domain and he has promised to keep us up to date with his progress

Just a quick one : With extreme gratitude to the guys over at Retro Gamer, we (CPC Zone) became "website of the month" in the printed magazine of all games gone by (May 2008). Inside the (currently still on sale, as of writing) issue of Retro Gamer you will find a brief interview with yours truly (me) about the website, it's future and more. For those that have missed the boat or simply cannot pick up the magazine in your country or indeed town we aim to get a snippet of this feature online and in the About Us > Media section of the website soon.

Thanks to everyone for your support.

Hello everyone, yes it has been a while since the last news update (a month in fact) but I just wanted to quickly let you know that I am constantly working on code upgrades, features and improvements for upcoming sections of CPC Zone. The first of which is live now, if you scroll down the page to the "Highest / Least Rated CPC Games" box you will notice that not only are we now displaying the most voted titles but you can now quickly flick between the most voted and least voted titles without having to ever reload the entire page. This is a totally new feature and should serve as a taste of things to come.

On the subject of game voting, previously if a single member voted a game 5 out of 5 then it would possibly find itself in the top voted games menu and unfairly knock a title out of the running, now our games require more than one vote before they even appear in these charts which should even out the balance nicely.

IMPORTANT UPDATE It seems that with the latest changes we accidentally broke the rating script and it wasn't saving your votes. It should be working fine again now, thanks.

Hello everyone, some things around here go unnoticed for such a long period of time that I am totally unaware that there is a problem, one such problem was the search function. It was reported via the forums that people could not search the website via the search box on the forum but it actually turns out that because of a security fix on the server, almost the entire script was acting strangely.

For instance if you searched for a game and no result was found then you were presented with a less then user friendly error message (this has now been fixed) or if you searched for a game developer as big as Ocean Software and found yourself looking at 40+ games, you were totally unable to get past the first page of results because the navigation at the bottom wasn't picking up your search terms (again fixed).

It is all working fine now (I think) so please try it out and if you spot anything then don't hesitate to post in the forums.

We are almost back at full speed, I need to do some further testing to ensure that everything went without a hitch. The plan wasn't so much to change how the site looks and feels but to change various pieces of code so that everything runs smoother and faster without putting any increased load on the server. It is worth noting that we haven't been told that we're going over any limits but of course anything we can do to prevent that is a bonus.

A couple of new features did manage to creep in though, for instance:

• the way the news is displayed
• news categories
• RSS feeds for each category
• moved : login box has gone from the menu on the right and is instead in a bar above the header
• fixed : some minor glitches with the browse function of Gamebase CPC
• changed : removed the Javascript for game galleries, now reverts back to the original lightbox

Everything else should be more or less the same, and that was the intention, so providing nothing has broken between then and now we should be fine.

Hello everyone, this is going to be a real quick message but I just want to let you know that the news will not be updated for a few days as important updates are being made. If you want to catch the latest happenings then we suggest you check out our forums where you can keep up to date and meet new friends.

The expected downtime is a few days and I will update the news again later to let you know how it all goes. Thanks.

CPC Zone is saddened to learn of the passing of Mark Haigh-Hutchinson from Pancreatic Cancer at the age of 43.

Mark converted a number of classic games on to the CPC including Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Paperboy, Android One, Highway Encounter and Alien Highway.

Latterly Mark moved on to work on a number of modern classics including Sam and Max Hit the Road and the Metroid Prime series.

On behalf of the forum members and staff of CPC Zone, I would like to extend our thoughts and best wishes to Mr Haigh-Hutchinson`s family and friends at this difficult time.

Regulars will notice that our forums are currently offline, this is due to an essential upgrade of the forum software with some critical bugs fixed and patched. I will update this story once the forum is live again, until then enjoy the main website.

Update

The forum is now back online and has been updated to the latest build, there are no mentionable new features but plenty of bug fixes that should keep the place nice and tidy for a while longer.

Richard over at The Bird Sanctuary (no, not a site dedicated to Birds of any kind) left us a note that the Fire/Silver/Rainbird dedicated website has been updated with a selection of long lost games for the Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64:

Firebird - Bo`s Shoot `em up (Unreleased), Cobber (Unreleased), Demons of Topaz
Rainbird - Corruption
Silverbird - Fungus Warriors (unreleased), Super Rider, Ultima Ratio, Zolyx

To read the full story click here to visit the Sanctuary.

The guys over at EuroGamer have just posted a video article that takes a look back at the Amstrad CPC arcade conversions so if you`re bored and fancy a little retro relief then why not head over here to make you feel all fuzzy and warm inside, and maybe a little bit older than you realised you were before you clicked that link.

Have fun :)

Thanks to cpc4eva for pointing this out.

Hello everyone, long time no see I know, sorry about that but real life is kind of taking up a large portion of my free time but I have been spending the odd hour or so tidying up the offline version of the website, changing the layout slightly, fixing the odd bug here and there, things like that. I (with any luck) plan on having these changes finished and uploaded shortly and I do hope that you will enjoy them.

With Christmas just around the corner I also plan on making a content update before the big day, that is the PLAN at least. If for some reason I vanish between now and then, I hope all of our visitors have a very merry and safe Christmas and a fantastic 2008.

Hello everyone, I`ve made a few slight changes to the website tonight, nothing that should have any obvious impact on your time visiting us but definitely worthwhile in the long run. First of all, the member features are currently disabled because the new version of PHPBB is about to drop and the code that manages your account needs to be edited to work around the new version. Second, the URLs have all been changed to provide a much cleaner look and is obviously a lot more search engine friendly than the previous structure, this looks simple but took a good few hours to get working. Last but not least I`ve shrunk the navigation on the left a little bit, changed them to a blue colour and made a number of small changes to the gamebase itself (you can now click the year a title was released and browse any other games from that year, for instance).

Better RSS Feed: The RSS feed for CPC Zone now displays the entire news story rather than just the headline and a link to our index page. Those of you who use RSS browsers or wish to import our feed into another website will no doubt by happy about this long overdue change.

Important for people linking to us: If you have linked to ANY of our Gamebase pages PLEASE adjust your URLs to match the new structure as soon as you can, this will prevent any future problems from arising. If you need to re-sync your database with ours then email me and I will provide you with all required details to sync yourself up.

Forums Updated: The forum software has just been updated to the latest build, please read the announcement in the forums for trouble shooting tips and advice. If you are unable to login to your account please contact us and we will reset your password accordingly.

Thanks, enjoy your stay.

You will all be happy (I think) to know that the hosting has just been renewed and the domain paid for meaning that CPC Zone will continue to be up and running for a while longer yet, it was due to be renewed in August. Thanks to everyone for your contribution, the hosting total came to just over £90.

I hope you continue to enjoy your stay here and that we won`t fall flat on our arse in the future.

Hello again, I`ve just switched the majority of the site layout over to the new one. Some things are still unfinished and for that reason I ask everyone to report any bugs or quirks in the forums. The site was tested on Opera, Firefox and IE6 before going live, it was not tested on any other browser including IE7 but I cannot see why it wouldn`t work (though I would NOT be surprised if it doesn`t).

The most interesting additions to the site are the ability to rate any game out of 5 so that we have a real time chart down in the bottom right corner, freestyle reviews that now allow you to write your own reviews in your own style with absolutely no set template (but it can`t be super-short!) a brand new cover browser that while preserving the various alternate covers keeps your results tight and compact. For instance if you search for Antiriad, you would normally get around 5 results, one for each alternate scan, now when you search you will get ONE result and in that result you will be able to access the alternate covers, so everyone remains credited just in a new and nice way.

PS : Remember to clear your cache! otherwise you`ll be looking at a complete mess of a website for an hour or two.

Have a play, report any problems in the forum, and enjoy it.

Things I have noticed after going live are:

1. The ratings box works when you click a star 1-5 and DOES accept your vote, the background image (stars) does not adjust though. Please DO vote for your games but be aware that the stars do not currently (at least in firefox) slide up and down with your mouse while you highlight your rating.
2. I forgot to upload a few functions, this is fixed now.

Hello everyone, you`re probably wondering why this site has not been updated yet and why the layout is STILL the same as last time you checked a few weeks ago. Well the truth is that I`ve been very sick this past couple of weeks and had little time to work on the new look, it isn`t that far from being completed though and should be live within a few weeks time (or less, you know me).

I need to renew the hosting in the next week or so (that`ll be fun) but CPC Zone will be running a while longer yet, don`t worry.

Yet AGAIN I have started working on a new layout for CPC Zone and hope to have it finished before the website itself is up for hosting renewal (expensive part of the year in August). CPC Zone has had so many new layouts over the years it should come as no surprise to our regular visitors that we are gearing up for another MAJOR change and I`m afraid some of you may be affected by these changes, though not too trivial they are fairly radical in the way we present our information.

If you browse CPC Zone via an old 800x600 resolution then you WILL have scrollbars when the new version of the website is uploaded, to be honest I would be incredibly surprised if you don`t already have this problem due to the number of images and artwork scans available on this site. It will fit best on 1024x768 or higher resolutions so the majority of you (according to the stats) should have a trouble free switchover.

I`ve posted a list of points that should be considered between now and then and invited your comments, but please do NOT be super-negative about things because it only really hinders the development process. Critics are welcome but providing they`re not just bullying a point from one person to the next, read more here

How I hate Internet Explorer, I really do wish that people would switch to Firefox and ditch the old thing for good. Its far outdated, doesn`t render HTML/CSS properly after all these years and has ripped ideas from Mozilla`s Firefox which set a new benchmark in browsing standards. Microsoft, if you`re listening, either fix the big blue IE or get rid of it forever.

Until that happens, I`ve just fixed the browse by genre page for IE7. Apparently you couldn`t click anything originally, this totally went over my head because I only use Firefox these days and sometimes test in IE6, so its partially my fault. Anyway all fixed now so you IE7 supporters can browse away.

Just before I head off to sleep, I have updated the way CPC Zone works in the following ways:

1. Post dates restored this was requested on the forums but is currently only applied to the main page
2. Game names added to nav, when viewing an entry the name of the game will be displayed as part of the top navigation
3. Browsing by genre, you will notice in the navigation on the right that I have added a new button labeled "Genres" and it does exactly what it says on the tin. You can browse Gamebase by the specified genre types.

To make the genre feature work correctly I had to change the definitions for some titles, for instance "TV Licence - Platform" has now become "TV Licence" and joined the rest of the set, this also applies to Movie Licenced games and Childrens games (of which we only had one anyway and that was Thomas The Tank Engine, which is educational).

Thats it for now, be back later with more.