The Official SimGates Home Page is:
http://www.pobox.com/~ericb/software/simgates/
Also be sure to check out my other software.
SimGates has three modes: Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, and George Washington. In one mode, Gates acts as a Microsoft cheerleader. In another mode, he argues the benefits of Microsoft competitors and government antitrust action. In the final mode, SimGates acts confused and often changes its opinions from one sentence to the next. Which mode results in which type of output is up to the user to discover. However, all three modes are designed to be ridiculous; if you find yourself in agreement with everything SimGates says in any particular mode, seek help immediately! Some examples of things you may hear are:
The statistics show that unless we support government regulation, Mr. McNealy's JavaOS has no chance of displacing Windows. Windows is a threat to innovation. It is not true that Microsoft is doing great software. Microsoft has cut off consumers and open Internet standards. My company and Netscape discussed dividing up the market.
Microsoft is innovation and Microsoft is choice. Mister Ballmer is nothing less than astonishing. I am convinced that the Macintosh is quite outrageous. Microsoft is the technological future of this country. Internet Explorer led to the creation of open Internet standards. To create a new standard, it takes something that's not just a little bit different. It takes something that's really new, and really captures people's imagination, and Windows meets that standard.You can alter SimGates's rate of speech using the Upgrade menu.
SimGates can run with only 2.5 megabytes of free RAM, but it asks for 8 megs. The less memory SimGates has, the more disk access there will be, since SimGates won't be able to hold as many sounds in memory at once. SimGates also requires System 7.0 or newer and Sound Manager 3.0 or newer (unless you have an old Mac, such as a Mac SE or Mac Classic, your computer supports Sound Manager 3.0).
If you need to calm your nerves after listening to SimGates for an extended period of time, you should try Om (BinHex, 168k) by Steve Wilkerson.
If you think this program is dumb, you should contact Microsoft for their new Brain 2000 Upgrade, which corrects the problem.
The GNU GPL also grants you the right to a copy of the program code, which you can obtain at the bottom of this page. SimGates was developed using FutureBasic 2.3.1.
SimGates comes with a ninety day, no questions asked, double money-back guarantee. If for any reason you are not satisfied with SimGates, simply return it within ninety days of purchase and we will promptly refund double the $0.00 purchase price.
Note: we are not responsible for loss of sanity suffered after listening to the product for unreasonably long periods of time.
As of this writing, SimGates is only "officially" available for the Macintosh. However, Jason Sterne did a rough port to Linux; at some point that may be officially released. Meanwhile, adventurous souls can play with the source (a separate stand-alone MP3 player such as MPEG123 is required), available here. You'll need all the .c and .h files of course, as well as the sentence and word files and all the audio files.
If you would like to port SimGates to another platform, I will be happy to assist you. You can look at the FutureBasic source, but for most people who don't know FutureBasic, the Inside SimGates document will be more useful. It reveals how SimGates stores its data and spells out the algorithms used to choose which sounds will be played together. If you decide you want to do a port, please contact me and we can discuss what sound file formats and text string formats would be easiest for you to use and for me to provide.
SimGates' icon was embraced and extended from BillBoot by Eric Traut. The "About" sound is courtesy of Robert Hommel's LoopSound demo.
SimGates 1.1 (StuffIt archive, 9.8
megabytes). SimGates requires System 7.0, Sound Manager 3.0 (which provides 16-bit sound support)
and at least 2.5 megabytes of available RAM
(8 megs recommended). Machines that do not support Sound Manager 3.0 include the Mac Plus, Mac SE,
and Mac Classic.
Changes in version 1.1: added an "Upgrades" menu to allow you to upgrade Bill's CPU or his OS, causing his rate of speech to either increase or decrease.
Changes in version 1.01: SimGates now verifies that 16-bit sound playback is available and that the OS version is 7.0 or later (versions of SimGates before 1.0b5 had used 8-bit sound, so this check had previously been unnecessary, but SimGates 1.0b5 and later failed to make this check despite using 16-bit sound). SimGates now uses the configurable program name in its error dialogs instead of always using the name "SimGates".
Sample audio output of Gates taking a pro-Microsoft
stance (MPEG layer II, 1.2 megs, 3 minutes playing time) or
an anti-Microsoft stance
(MPEG layer II, 774k, 2 minutes playing time). For those of you
who are unable to run SimGates on your computer, these are samples of what you are missing.
SimGates 1.1 main
source code (16k), the globals/constants definition file (3k),
the string resource validation INCLUDE file (10k), and
resource file (9.7 MB). If you create a derivative
work based on SimGates, I request (but do not require) that you send me a copy and allow me to
mention your work on this page (and link to it, if its available on the Internet).
Inside SimGates. This
document contains the information needed to customize SimGates using a resource
editor (assuming that you already know how to use a resource editor). It also describes
the algorithms SimGates uses (for people who want to port the program but
who are not familiar with reading FutureBasic source code).
DumpSTR# source code (6k). FutureBasic source for a program that
reads the SimGates resource file and dumps the word lists and sentence definitions into
a text file. See the comment block at the start of the source code for the file format. The
output from this program is intended to assist in porting.
Sentence definition (8k) and
word list (5k) text files created by running DumpSTR# on SimGates 1.11.
See the DumpSTR# source's main comment block for the format of the text files. These files are
intended to assist in porting.
Audio tar.gz file (1.9 MB). Contains
each of the sounds used by SimGates in 64 kbps MPEG layer III format.
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