La Abadía del Crimen

The Abbey of Crime is a murder mystery set in a Benedictine abbey that features a pious obedience meter (seriously). It was never translated from the original Spanish, though fan translations exist.

It's also (in)famous for having a rather hilarious (and arguably somewhat creepy) anti-piracy measure.

Anti-Piracy#

Upon startup, the game checks whether the palette is unmodified and whether the audio tracks are stored in their original configurations (i.e., track names and directory). If either of these checks fails (i.e., palette modified, audio files renamed or moved away), the game will start as normal until the player reaches the abbey for the prayer and the brief cutscene of the last friar reaching the abbey.

On legitimate copies, a snippet of Franz Schubert's Ave Maria plays during the praying sequence, and after that the game continues.

...But on pirated copies (since the protection is tripped), the snippet is instead replaced with a harsh voice calling the player "¡PIRATA!" ("PIRATE!" in Spanish) ten times in descending tones. After that, the game crashes due to a code jump. This effectively prevents the player from making any further progression.

This protection is present in all versions of the game. Modern ROMs (including one with the English translation) have typically been rewritten to skip the praying sequence, and thus avoid tripping the protection.

Unused Text#

Interestingly, in the DOS version, at 0x4729 in the ABADIA2.OVL overlay file there is a fragment of hidden text that belongs to another videogame developed by the same company, Mundial de Fútbol, which was released later in 1990 for DOS, Amstrad CPC, Amstrad PCW, ZX Spectrum and MSX:

The following is a list of each of the 24 national teams that can be chosen in that game. This snippet was originally used to implement the loading screen for the aforementioned football videogame in the tape versions. These texts were displayed on a ticker whilst the game was loading.