RCX and OSX Leopard

[kevin1977]

Greetings, this is my first post, so direct me to the right place to ask this question if I should be in the wrong place...

I haven't touched my RCX in a couple of years, but I recently bought the Hitechnic IR Link sensor, and wanted to control my old RCXes.
Unfortunately I can't find anything about it on the net... Most of the software I had no longer works on Leopard.

I used to have a commandline NQC compiler. With it I could also download the firmware to the brick. Can anyone direct me to a link or a website where I could find it? And if it still works on Leopard... Is anyone still using it on Leopard?


I have osx 10.6.6
An RCX with new batteries
A USB tower and some programming experience...

All help would be appreciated!

[dsjove]

I just went through this, and had BrickCC John's help.

You need to download
- latest Fantom driver from LEGO
LEGO.com -> Products ->Mindstorms -> Support -> Files -> Drivers -> Downloads -> Mac
- NBC compiler
http://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/nbc/
- Extended firmware
It was emailed to me. Not required but highly recommended
- NeXT Tools
http://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/utilities.html

[dsjove]

If you search this forum you can find several links for an XCode MakeFile.

[kevin1977]

But that is for the NXT, isn't it?

I have my NXT working fine, no problem there. But I wanted to use my RCX again, the yellow brick...

I just found this on WIKI... I don't know if it is true, but it makes sense...

The tower does not work at all on 64-bit OSes, but it is possible to set-up a virtual machine with a 32-bits OS to keep an old RCX Mindstorms alive.

[dsjove]

My RCX unfortunately died. I haven't been able to try it Sorry I misunderstood your question. We run the free VirtualBox to setup a Windows virtual machine for my wife's work. I remember doing something like that a long time ago for RCX Mindstorms when there was a complete break in Mac support.

[mattallen37]

My RCX unfortunately died...

Have you tried fixing it? I have been able to fix about 15 of them, and only have two that I can't fix (or haven't been able to so far). To me, a broken RCX is worth almost as much as a working one, especially if there isn't a lot of corrosion from batteries.

[dsjove]

The view button has died. I took it apart and other button contacts wouldn't make it work. Any ideas? And I am in the same boat as Kevin - bad Mac support for old RCX.

[mattallen37]

Only the View button doesn't work? The RCX still powers on, and the other three buttons are fine? Is there any corrosion on the PCB (or even in the battery compartment)?

I don't use a Mac really at all, and certainly not for programming. I found that Windows doesn't support the USB tower anymore; however, Xander said that a serial tower with a USB to serial adapter work fine on his Win 7 machine.

[dsjove]

Just that button. No apparent corrosion. I downloaded the old NQC. It will not communicate to the RCX.

[mattallen37]

It sounds like it just doesn't have firmware on it. Try reflashing it with the 2.0 FW. Remember, whenever you take out the batteries, you need to redownload it. If it doesn't have FW on it, it will appear that the View button doesn't work (it isn't programmed to do anything). I think it would also explain why you can't connect with BCC. What do you mean "the old NQC"? You mean an older version of BCC? The newest BCC should work fine with NQC, assuming you can use Windows (I don't think BCC works on Mac).