TRACON is a series of game software programs that simulate an air traffic control environment on a personal computer.

The games were originally sold by Texas-based Wesson International as an offshoot to their line of professional air traffic control simulation products.

At periodic screen updates, aircraft icons move slowly across the controller's sector.

There are two ways to run ATC simulation scenarios : a) random ones created by the program itself, or b) your own ones which you may edit with a simple text editor (file extension *.sim), following all the syntax rules and geographical sector details .

Each game sees a different mix of aircraft, callsigns, start- and end-points, unless the user elects to "repeat the last simulation."

"AA34 with you at one one thousand," the status line will display this in text, voice of the calling pilot will play, and the icon will persistently flash.

If ignored, the aircraft will circle and hold at the radio fix identified as the beginning-point in the player's sector.

In case (b) the player selects his own simulation (*.sim) file to run and the scenario unfolds exactly as described by the designer.

In this case the possibilities to use TRACON II as a more realistic ATC simulator are many, adding to it the fact that a user may also design his entirely own airspace-sectors (file extension *.sec) to work with.

Thus a large number of fans all over the world appeared offering sectors and simulation files well beyond the standard ones coming with this package.

It ran on an 8088-based PC with a single 5.25-inch floppy disk drive, DOS 2, 256KB RAM, and an EGA or 640x480 VGA display.

Simulated paper strips allowed the player to see pending flight plans and aircraft within your sector.

Users could choose crosswind directions and speeds, whether pilots were talented or sometimes missed instructions, and how many aircraft were present over what length of time.

If sound was turned off, the PC speaker would chirp to alert the player that a new aircraft request was in their queue.

In the game, aircraft with a flight plan involving a landing must be vectored to a proper altitude at the start of the approach pattern.

Failure to get the aircraft lined up at a reasonable altitude got the response, "AA34 executing missed approach."

Mid-air crashes end the game and pop a dialog box with one of a group of several messages.

It provided an audio track for a demonstration scenario taking place in the Los Angeles Sector.

Although it starts as a normal Terminal Area Control, at the moment a flight is put on its final track, by pressing the F2 key, the aircraft was transferred to the GCA position and the screen was changed to the equivalent Precision Approach Radar one, while the rest of the traffic was actually 'frozen', meaning that you could continue control this single aircraft and after landing, you could then move over to the previous Terminal Area Control to keep on with the rest of the traffic that had stayed at the moment you moved to the GCA position.

Within a short time frame, the player had to attach the correct ident (55Z) to the VFR aircraft.

It is worth mentioning that in this TRACON for Windows version the player is given the option to work in TRACON or RAPCON but under RAPCON we simply see a classic Terminal Area Control over some military sectors, without any apparent possibility of reverting to the Precision Approach Radar position.

"[2] In a 1994 survey of wargames Computer Gaming World gave RAPCON three stars out of five, describing it as "detailed ... quite interesting", but for "a narrow market".