Recent advances in personal computers (PCs) have made PCs a potentially attractive platform for electronic combat (EC) simulators. Low cost, widespread availability, and a familiar user interface appeal to the user community. Increased performance, a large selection of systems and components, and broadly used development tools and environments attract the developer.

In spite of the many advantages of commercial PCs, their fixed size and architecture impose design constraints. Ideally, an off-the-shelf PC would contain the processing bandwidth, memory, auxiliary storage, and video and audio capabilities to fully simulate an EC environment and a student's equipment suite while providing computer-aided instruction. Users, who define requirements, and designers, who consider design alternatives, need to be aware of the impact various alternatives have on PC resources.

This paper summarizes the essential characteristics of an EC simulator, analyzes software signal generation approaches that drive computational resources, reviews current PC capabilities to support those approaches, and assesses the PC's suitability as a platform for EC simulators and recommends training situations where it should be considered.