bluejay

There was some talk a few years ago about adding them as consoles in MAME, but I don't believe that it ever really went anywhere.  From what I remember of the (relatively brief) discussion, obstacles included:

• Obtaining the units, which were mostly on lease to the airlines and maintained under contract by the manufacturer
• Some may have worked on a VDI / thin client model, so could be relatively hardware-intensive to emulate
• Software would have to be extracted from units that weren't taken back by the manufacturer, which would make it as difficult to find in the wild as the hardware
• Potential for whole-disk encryption, security keys / dongles, etc.

It wasn't so much that there was any opposition to the idea or that they were considered unreasonable to emulate, but that the practicalities of obtaining a working setup to reverse-engineer and emulate were very significant.

Semi-related: What I would really love is some emulator of those 3D non-textured driving simulators that driving schools have been using for decades. I googled like crazy, but I had no luck. I remember being hypnotized by those machines as a kid. Computerized visual tests are interesting too.

It's sad that some programs/games/books are lost forever. And let's not talk about songs created thousands of years ago, as we only have the instruments for those.