Up to the Shirenewton Home Page


LEGO Mindstorms with DOS



Why bother?

There are many PC owners, including myself, who do not like Windows 95 or the C language. In fact, many of us are happy with DOS, and only use Windows 3.1 when we have to. Some have older computers which are not capable of running W95. Because of this, and encouraged by reading about the Perl script written by Paul Haas, I decided to have a go at writing software in Microsoft QBasic (comes free with DOS) to talk to the RCX.

These are my aims and my progress so far:

  1. Write a program to send single commands, and receive replies from the RCX - Completed 1 Jan 1999
  2. Write a firmware download program - Completed 14 Apr 1999
  3. Write a program which will download Mindstorms scripts to the RCX
  4. Write a compiler for RCX programs - would NQQB (Not Quite QBasic) be a suitable name?
  5. Do it all again in Visual Basic 3 for Windows 3.1

I also wrote a program to print a Gray Code shaft-encoder disk for use with lego motors.

If you have any comments or queries, please email them or send them in the form below

From: (name)

Email address:


All Trademarks acknowledged

These pages have been viewed lots of times since 25 October 1998