Bringing 1986 Sprites Back to Life with App Inventor!

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Hi everyone,

I wanted to share a little project that's very special to me. A few days ago, my cousin and I recovered some sprites we designed back in 1986 for the ZX Spectrum. It's been 39 years! After finding them again, we thought it would be great to bring them back to life — and what better way to do it than with App Inventor?

We used only the built-in tools provided by App Inventor: just the Canvas and Sprites components, without any extensions. Our goal was to preserve the original graphics within the game area, keeping that classic 8-bit style that meant so much to us during our childhood.

Thanks for reading, and I hope this little tribute to those old days brings a smile to your face.


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Nice a dip in the heart, when we were young.

Can you share this series of sprites with us in the community?

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hello, will you provide the .aia file for this game?
or do you want to sell it?

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Hi Gian_Luca, thank you for your interest. It will be available on the Play Store soon, and yes, it will be free.

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Hi marco, thank you for your interest. It will be available on the Play Store soon.

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Hello @Asanabria (Andrés Sanabria), thank you for sharing this ZX Spectrum game (for me is part of my hobby, i am a ZX Spectrum homebrew developer, so my cumpliments for you for bringing this to AI2). I want to ask you IN DETAIL how do you deal with the loading of the ROMS (tap, tzx, sp, z80) files here in the AI2 IDE. By the way I am interested in all the details. If you like we can talk outside of the forum.
Now i am in the transition of developing to my full time job (ARCADE builder and repairing). I do it in my native town and i have a lot of things to do, but i can make me time for talk about this, (in any way, because i love the ZX scene).
So, Please, let me know if you are interest and maybe i can make some contacts with people of the scene.

By the way, My name is German and i am from Argentina and i am constantly connected to the forum. so please, share some words with me. (Thanks in advance for any message you share with me).

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Dear German,

Thank you so much for your interest in my little project!

As I mentioned before, I’m an old ZX Spectrum programmer — though I barely remember how to code in assembler these days! After recently recovering some sprites I created many years ago on a real ZX Spectrum, I felt inspired to bring them to life again.

This time, however, I'm doing it with App Inventor. It’s not an emulator — just a simple game that uses graphics originally made on the ZX Spectrum back in the 1980s.

Thanks again for taking the time to reach out. It really means a lot!

Warm regards,