Glad someone found it! :)

But maybe I should've saved this method for a better giveaway; sorry it's only a Fortix... :)

Took me an hour to remember enough 6502 to make the puzzle, and in the end I just looked up the remaining opcodes online anyway. Seems these things rust after you leave them outside too long... :)

I'm just a beginner at this puzzle stuff, have seen a lot of better ones around... :) But thank you for the kind words... :)

Sorry to make you work so hard for a Fortix... :) Wish I had something better to give away, but I just won the Fortix so this seemed to be the proper thing... :)

Sorry for taking so much time, if I ever make something obscure like that again I'll try to put a better game at the end... :)

Interesting! There's no obfuscating or self-modifying code, so I'm not sure what went wrong with the emulator you tried... I only tested two different ones, and poking around a bit now it seems I overlooked some semi-functional ones... :(

And the reason I was looking for some variation on "Apple 2e" - the original "Apple ][" couldn't print "EWz6y" because it had no lower-case. :) So one random example, http://www.scullinsteel.com/apple2/ doesn't work but http://www.scullinsteel.com/apple//e does.

Hmm, you might be able to step through the program in your head with the help of the "Apple ][ Reference Manual" and a lot of free time... :)

Before our family had a computer I "ran" a lot of programs that way, by borrowing similar books from school, writing things on paper and trying to imagine what happens. But I think an emulator is a more practical solution in this century... :)

Seems it's difficult to find a lot of old information like this, unless you already know the answer. I used http://www.6502.org/tutorials/6502opcodes.html because I couldn't remember the exclusive-or opcodes. Every letter was exclusive-ored with #$CF in case someone just hunted through "A2 05 BD 0E 03 49 CF 20 ED FD CA 10 F5 60 42 36 79 35 18 0A" looking for the "EWz6y"... :)