After a series of behind the scenes delays, both 'Star Sabre' and 'Balloonacy' are now available to buy from the Cronosoft website.

'Star Sabre' is described as: "A superb shooter from down under - Paul Kooistra's 'Star Sabre' is slick and smooth, and very colourful. Bound to be a hit game!"

Meanwhile 'Balloonacy' is a nod for the puzzlers and is a conversion of a C64 game by Kev Thacker.

Both games are priced at £2.99 each on cassette with a full colour inlay or £1.75 for the emulator image. A £1.00 royalty goes to the authors for each copy sold.

As well as the two new releases, Cronosoft also still have in stock some other CPC games namely: 'The Smirking Horror', 'Stranded', 'Iron Sphere', 'Yarkon Blues', 'Yarkon Blues II' and 'Help Inc."

Thanks to Simon for the news and the hard work that goes into getting these games out on sale.

This is a re-post of a news item that I appear to have accidentally deleted!

There is a project already well underway looking to upload all of the type-ins from CPC magazines to the CPCwiki. An initial suggest by forum member Tastefulmrship, the project has grown some 'Crazy Legs' and has 'Bustout' from one person's project into a full scale 'Space Mania' on the boards!

If you've got some spare time on your hands and going a bit 'Frantic Freddy' trying to fill it, launch a 'Missile Attack' on the listings that haven't been touched yet and quick as a 'Flashman' we'll have a fullly loaded archive!

So don't be a 'Duck Dodgers', get involved and start knocking those listings up!

Even if, like me, you're rubbish at type-ins and don't know your read error b's from your read error a's, some of the progs that have already been completed have been uploaded to cpcwiki by Ervin and can be downloaded from here.

Don't worry though because if your favourite hasn't been uploaded yet, chances are that it'll be there soon enough so keep checking back for updates!

Thanks again to Ervin for the news

Time for a spot of catch-up!

Another twelve reviews are available for you to digest in your own good time and have helped take us over the 800 reviews marker!

From betpet:

• Dark Side
• Driller
• Electro Freddy
• Head Over Heels
• Knight Tyme
• Laser Squad
• Sorcery Plus

From Firefly:

• 180

From Lockett:

• Hypsys

From Match Point:

• Peter Shiltons Handball Maradona

From Novus:

• Knightmare

From Ritchardo mkII:

• The Addams Family

All of these can be found in the reviews section, thanks to everyone for your continued support.

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.

Okay here we go, a great big cover update for you all to check out over the bank holiday, thanks to everyone below for your contributions. We still have a lot more to get through so if your hard work has not yet been added to CPC Zone then please do be patient, we will get around to it.

From Nich Campbell:

• Myrddin Flight Simulation by Myrddin Software
• Star Trooper by Players
• Reckless Rufus by Alternative Software (R)
• Superkid in Space by Atlantis
• Throne of Fire by Melbourne House (F&B)
• The Archon Collection by Electronic Arts (R) (F&B)
• Microids Action Pack by Microids (F&B)
• F-15 Strike Eagle by Microprose (R) (F&B)
• Gunboat by Accolade (F&B)
• Jump Jet by Anirog (1594)
• Night Raider by Gremlin Graphics (F&B)
• PHM Pegasus by Electronic Arts (F&B)
• Americas Cup Challenge by US Gold (F&B)
• Future Bike Simulator by Hi-Tec Software
• Kettle by Alligata Software (F&B)
• Lee Enfield : An Amazon Adventure (F&B)
• Spindizzy by Electric Dreams (R) (F&B)
• Spindizzy by Electric Dreams - Winner
• Terminus by Mastertronic (R)
• Zone Trooper by Cascade Games

From : Ritchardo mkII:

• Snooker by Gem Software
• Jet Boot Jack by English Software
• Laserwarp by Mikro-Gen
• Mutant Monty by Artic Computing Ltd
• Pyjamarama by Mikro-Gen
• Roland Ahoy! by Computersmith

From Robcfg:

• Trantor by US Gold (ERBE version)

From S_Famicom:

• 3D Pool by Firebird (F&B)
• Jack and the Beanstalk by Thor Software
• Kentilla by Mastertronic
• Tusker by System 3 (F&B)
• UN Squadron by Capcom (F&B)
• X-Out by Rainbow Arts (F&B)

From WOS:

• La Abadia Del Crimen by OperaSoft
• African Trail Simulator by Positive (F&B)

(R) = Replacement of a previous scan.

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.