With adequate documentation, they could be emulated, at least at the input/output level.
Would be fun then to add new missions to an old simulator :-)
IIRC, the original ones were not raster displays, but long-persistence X-Y displays.
While it's a imperfect preservation from a historical standpoint giving a lot of people the opportunity to experience it would help preserve it for the future.
Museums often struggle with this. Some historically interesting piece of whatever languishes and then eventually gets chucked whereas something that's more completely unremarkable and low value and common enough to let people actually interact with it winds up being the star of their collection.
But then it would also offer an arcade style version that the general public could just flip switches to try out.
I’m guessing the general public would not be able to follow the sequences needed to make the original approachable or fun.
I proposed a interactive art piece for Burning Man that offered this “follow the sequence by flipping switches and hitting buttons” game.
But then the pandemic hit became one of the worst ideas possible.
Here’s the concept video I put together:
Maybe I'm weird, but the details of the computers and however they were producing the graphics with mid-70s technology is actually more interesting to me than the simulator itself.
Are they using computer graphics by that point? Or are they stuck with computer-controlled cameras over over physical models?
Edit: Found some high-level documentation of the whole computer systems[1]. Based on the description of the visual system on page 117, it looks like has specialised hardware for lit, flat-shaded polygonal graphics.
[1] https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1980NASCP2150..113O