simulation

One of the challenging things has been to find a way to light up lights and respond to buttons that located around the ship. This looks like a possible way to simplify the output. Certainly a MIDI file could do some cool animated lights and servos.
Unfortunately it only supports MIDI output, (and THRU) so it cannot be used to gather input.

[http://highlyliquid.com/kits/decoder.html MIDI Decoder]

This mostly just to create some links to interesting sites worthy of more investigation:

[http://jsbsim.org JSB Open Source Flight Dynamics Modeler]

JSBSim is an open source flight dynamics model (FDM) that compiles and runs under many operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh, Linux, IRIX, Cygwin (Unix on Windows), etc. The FDM is essentially the physics/math model that defines the movement of an aircraft, rocket, etc., under the forces and moments applied to it using the various control mechanisms and from the forces of nature.

[http://www.openeaagles.org/ Open Extensible Architecture for the Analysis and Generation of Linked Simulations]