Amateur flight simulation

Amateur flight simulation refers to the simulation of various aspects of flight or the flight environment for purposes other than flight training or aircraft development. There is currently a significant community of simulation enthusiasts supported by several commercial software packages, as well as commercial and homebuilt hardware.

Prior to the rise of video games, Sega produced arcade games that resemble video games, but were in fact electro-mechanical games that used rear image projection in a manner similar to the ancient zoetrope to produce moving animations on a screen. One such electro-mechanical game by Sega was Jet Rocket, a crude flight simulator featuring cockpit controls that could move the player aircraft around a landscape displayed on a screen and shoot missiles onto targets that explode when hit. In 1975, Taito released a simulator video game, Interceptor, which was a crude arcade first-person combat flight simulator that involved using an eight-way joystick to aim with a crosshair and shoot at enemy aircraft that move in formations of two and scale in size depending on their distance to the player.

Flight simulators were among the first types of programs to be developed for early personal computers. Bruce Artwick's subLOGIC simulators were well known for the functionality they managed to get onto 8-bit machines. Key computer game technologies such as 3D graphics, online play, and modding were first showcased in combat flight simulators such as Red Baron II and European Air War. The game world in flight simulators is often based on the real world. However, they are often confined to one part of the game world by invisible boundaries. In some games, the aircraft simply halts in midair, while other games force the player to turn around. However, many games solve this boundary problem by wrapping the game world as a sphere.

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