Ali Baba translations/hacks
A downloadable game
Ali Baba: The world’s most translated ZX Spectrum game
A retro maze classic reborn in 62+ languages – including right-to-left, vertical, and fictional scripts – with enhanced animation, cheats, bug fixes, and typographic care.
Originally a little-known 1985 Croatian ZX Spectrum arcade game, Ali Baba was never released beyond the Balkans – and certainly never imagined in Klingon, Mongolian, or Arabic. This ROM hack changes that. What began as a simple translation grew into months of reverse engineering, animation refinement, linguistic research, and 8-bit typography innovation – all to create something unprecedented: the most linguistically diverse ZX Spectrum game in history.
Unprecedented language support
62+ fully localized versions – from Greek and Ukrainian to Wolof, Inuktitut, and Amharic.
First-ever ZX Spectrum game in many of these languages – including Chinese (Simplified), Mongolian (Traditional vertical script), Hindi, and Korean.
Right-to-left (RTL) rendering for Arabic and Hebrew – correctly mirrored UI, aligned text, and culturally appropriate layout.
Vertical writing support for Mongolian, faithfully reproducing its classical top-to-bottom reading direction – a world first on the Spectrum platform.
Even fictional languages are fully implemented: Klingon (in both Latin and native script), Vulcan, and four distinct Romulan orthographies (including handwritten variants).
Animation and visual polish
The key's rotation frames were doubled from 8 to 16 hand-drawn frames, creating smooth 22.5° increments (vs. the original 45°). Timing was meticulously adjusted to preserve gameplay feel.
All in-game text is centered and visually balanced – a major upgrade over the sparse original menu.
Pseudo-variable-width typography: narrow letters (i, l, t, ') are kerned with appropriate spacing, and common letter combinations are pre-rendered as custom tiles to avoid the "stretched" look of fixed-width fonts. The result? Text that looks natural – even in complex scripts.
Bug fixes and QoL improvements
Fixed the level 256 crash and replaced with a "Congratulations!" screen.
Fixed lives counter overflow (99 → 0); now capped at 99 lives.
Redesigned the key redefinition screen: pressing SPACE now displays "SPACE" (localized) instead of an invisible character.
Cheat system (toggle during gameplay)
CAPS + g: Open all treasure gates instantly.
CAPS + h: Freeze movement anywhere (toggle on/off).
CAPS + i: 3-state toggle: invisible to red enemy → hide enemy → restore normal.
CAPS + k: Spawn the key.
CAPS + l: Gain one life.
CAPS + n: Skip to next level.
CAPS + t: Drain timer while held.
The Greek version is published by GreekRoms and is available here.
If you'd like to see Ali Baba translated into another language – or if you can help with linguistic verification – just leave a comment! We're open to adding more languages, and your suggestion might become the next one.
Arabic translation:
English translation:
Georgian translation:
Greek translation:
Hindi translation:
Klingon translation:
Mongolian translation:
Portuguese translation:
Ukranian translation:
Obsolete.gr is not affiliated with SUZY SOFT, the original developer of Ali Baba; copyright for the original game remains with them.
Translation and hacking was done by Vag.
Download
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Comments
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Great game, thanks.
Hi Czas Na Retro,
Thank you! And thanks so much for making a gameplay video, I really appreciate you sharing the game with your audience. I hope you also enjoyed the Polish translation!
Czas Na Retro is a fantastic name, by the way!
This game is really cool, I played it for the first time. I'd seen the Polish language, but I used the English version.
Amazing!
However, the most remarkable omission from this vast list of languages is the most essential one of all. Which language, though now 'dead' as a spoken language, is fundamentally important because it's the root for so many other languages? Latin, of course! So, why no Latin version of this game, when several translations are even of fictional languages (Klingon, Romulan…) that no-one speaks at all!?
I'd suggest that if you add any other languages at all, Latin MUST be a top priority. It'd also be good to see Esperanto included.
Hello Richard,
Thank you so much for your kind words — and for this excellent point! You're absolutely right: Latin is not just another language, but the root of many others!
In fact, Latin and Esperanto were both on my original roadmap — along with Ancient Greek, Persian, Slovak, Kannada, and more. I even started early work on Japanese (Katakana) and a few other scripts. But with limited time and the sheer scale of 62 languages already implemented, I had to pause for now.
That said — your comment has moved Latin to the top of my priority list, and I'll begin work on it soon :-)
By the way, there are 5 billion Klingons, 6 billion Vulcans, and maybe 18 billion Romulans, and they had no Spectrum games on their planets!
:-D
Thanks again for caring enough to ask!
Hi,
Thanks for that very positive response! You've done something pretty remarkable with all this language work, and I know you can't support all languages out there (62 is an incredible first start…) – but, as you acknowledge, Latin is a particularly important one. I'm glad to hear that it now has top priority!
One other suggestion is that you might include some instructions about how to play the basic game! Your docs are all about the language aspects – which is obviously what makes this release particularly interesting, but it's not immediately obvious what the objective of the game actually is, if you come to it without having seen it before! Some simple instructions would probably be helpful.
As for the various Star Trek languages… I don't think you can really be sure that the Klingons, Vulcans and Romulans never had Spectrum games. After all, Star Trek is set far in our future, when computers primarily talk to you rather than having simple bitmapped displays, but rumour has it that the operating systems of the computers installed on even the earliest Federation starships came bundled with at least one Spectrum emulator – and Memory Alpha has a complete archive of all known 8-bit software ever written, for all systems. Both the Romulans and the Klingons plundered that archive through espionage in its earliest days, whilst the Vulcans had legitimate access, and it's fair to assume that word of the Spectrum spread rapidly across the entire Alpha Quadrant as the other races rearched the origins of humanity's technology. Quite what they thought about our early computers isn't known; but how could they not be impressed?
In fact, if you watch the early part of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, when the Enterprise bridge is in chaos and the computers have crashed, you can clearly hear Spectrum loading sounds. It's clear proof that an errant ensign was trying to sneak a quick game of Jet-Set Willy just before the crisis began.
Hi again Richard,
Since I had some free time over Christmas, I went ahead and finished the Esperanto translation! :-)
It turned out to be more technically demanding than I expected — but I managed to implement full pseudo-variable-width typography (custom kerning for narrow letters, pre-rendered combinations, etc.). In fact, very few of the other translations achieve this level of polish.
Hope you enjoy it!
Regards.
Saluton!
Excellent work – many thanks!
Thanks!
The Latin translation is also finished — and order is restored :-)
Now I'm waiting for a complete Ferengi dictionary... so I can add it next!