Ok, giveaways are over, will try to explain the puzzle now. Was no mind-reading necessary, no brute-force nonsense, guess a number from 1 to 1000, favourite colour, etc. Sorry if it was junk anyway, was my first try making one...
View profile on suspicious person, see they have two private giveaways running. Well, maybe you should look for them... :)
Just "view source" in your browser, see link to the First Fortix Giveaway. There's no trick, don't need to juggle any letter permutations, link is right there. If you didn't try view source before, how did you expect ever to find a hidden giveaway? :)
Hmm, what about the second giveaway? Well, visit the first giveaway (and enter it!) There you see a comment "Hope you can get to a command prompt... :)" Ok, don't know what that means so try view source again. I'm not sneaky enough to make a big scavenger hunt. Hooray, we see a Puzzle Link...
Puzzle is only one question, a picture asking "What is this thing?" Ok, as you should know, google image search will solve 99% of the picture puzzles. You don't need to know all the obscure movie characters, or places, or whatever. Google knows, just copy whatever it tells you...
So google says "Best guess for this image: manual typewriter." Well that was easy, but it's wrong? Bogus puzzle! Well, maybe if you're young enough it looks like a manual typewriter, but no. I messed with the picture until google guessed wrong. It's just some ancient computer, and if you're old maybe you even used one before... If you're not old, you will have to keep exploring google to find something similar. Good luck, I don't know how to make that part easy. Lot of these things in the background in some picture, not so many people telling you what it is. Remember it's just a fortix giveaway, so if you're spending 30 minutes on it, just find a better puzzle. Sorry! :)
Anyway, assuming you didn't give up, mine was called "Apple //e" although "Apple 2e" or "Apple IIe" also worked for this answer. Plain "Apple" or "Apple 2" are wrong, for a good reason, as you'll see eventually... Now remember this answer, and see what happens next.
Answering the puzzle gives you:
Q0FMTCAtMTUxDQozMDA6QTIgMDUgQkQgMEUgMDMgNDkgQ0YgMjAgRUQgRkQgQ0EgMTAgRjUgNjAgNDIgMzYgNzkgMzUgMTggMEENCjMwMEcNCg==
From doing other puzzles, you should know that's base64. If you didn't know it, now you do. Remember, for if you keep doing puzzles you will see it again. So google base64, and find a decoder somewhere. That (finally!) gives you:
CALL -151
300:A2 05 BD 0E 03 49 CF 20 ED FD CA 10 F5 60 42 36 79 35 18 0A
300G
Ok, what is this junk? Again, if you're old and used an Apple 2 back in the stone age, maybe you even recognise this nonsense and already know the next step. But, for other people, you have 3 things:
Hope you can get to a command prompt
picture of an Apple //e
Bunch of junk I don't understand
Any ideas? Any at all? If you google CALL -151 you get a bunch of nonsense, so put quotes around it "CALL -151" - looks like this is something you can type into an old Apple. I'm not going to buy a 30-year-old computer just to win a Fortix, and I hope you don't either...
So, for anyone who got stuck on this step I apologise. The comment Hope you can get to a command prompt was about as explicit as I could be without just telling you how to solve it. And where's the fun in that? So go find an Apple //e emulator and type in that junk!
If you got this far you can find your own emulator, they are everywhere. Eventually you'll boot up your fake Apple //e, and get to the Applesoft Basic command prompt which looks like
]
Type in those three lines of junk and you get:
EWz6y
And for anyone who tried to find some hidden ascii in "A2 05 BD 0E 03 49 CF 20 ED FD CA 10 F5 60 42 36 79 35 18 0A" - sorry, it was in 6502 machine language, and I XORd the text with 0xCF so the lazy guys wouldn't solve it. Wouldn't need an emulator to handle 10 PRINT "EWz6y" :)
This also explains why "Apple 2" was a wrong answer - it couldn't print lower-case(!)
So, finally, you took your five characters to steamgifts and found the Second Fortix Giveaway! Oh, but it's already over? Yeah, sorry. Better luck next time! :)
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Thanks to atb85 I am finally able to stop entering Fortix giveaways... :)
Also, since I actually won two of the Fortix giveaways simultaneously (before the re-roll, naturally) I decided to give away two myself. But I haven't figured out this hidden junk yet, so let me know if it works... :)
Congratulations to kOROMOShYdOpOlOuS, next person who caught the Fortix virus... :)
(tick tick tick...)
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