Using old Lego Mindstorms with modern computers 

thanks for the vid! I just got an old kit off ebay and was wondering what hoops I'd need to jump through to get it to work. you saved me a lot of time!

you can actually repair those old cables pretty easily, the plug ends are snapped together and can be opened with a little finesse and the wires inside are only attached by vampire taps so you can just pull out the old wires once you have the plugs open and push in new ones, speaker wire works fine for this, the only exception to this is things like the light sensor which are glued shut and internally soldered, you can still get it open end replace the cable but its a fair bit more destructive and wont look all that good afterward if you are too rough with it

Great video. I had no idea this lego even existed

Awesome. A Friend just give me one and i thought i was not going to make it work. Thanks.

You just earned a sub. Good job!

It’s interesting how the installation and running is so slow on your modern system with virtualised Windows. I have a Compaq Evo N620c laptop that I’ve prepared specifically for Mindstorms - I chose this model (from 2004) because it has Windows 98 driver support, plus a real serial and parallel port as well as USB for convenience. It’s a very fast Windows 98 system, being a 1.5GHz Pentium M. Installation of Mindstorms 1.5 took less than five minutes and it starts with only a second displaying ‘Loading…’ The software really flies, videos play immediately, and it’s especially nice not to have User Account Control or any other interventions. Also, the 1024x768 display works well for RCX code - not so great for all those video segments that seem to expect a 640x480 display!

The VM trick is smart

Couldn't you just use a serial card? Or did your computer not have any PCIe slots?

Thanks for this video. I plan to do this even tho I have it working on an old PC. One PC is all I have room for. BatteryPoweredBricks has a video on how to repair your 9v wires.

I remember this thing being in an episode of Zoom I always wanted it but it was too expensive

I had issues using the serial IR tower, but trying a different USB to serial adapter solved that. I have never found a way to use the USB IR tower

A very entertaining video 😀

It was difficult to get it running on Windows XP. For me, what worked was downloading QuickTime 6.5.2 from Apple and then writing a custom batch file to delete a temporary file that causes a crash every time it runs, and using that batch file to run the program. Also, I'm pretty sure you can get the USB tower to work on 32-bit Windows 10, but I haven't tried.

👍👍👍👍👍

You look like that harry potter character with orange hair :D

Thanks!

You can also use usb2serial on a modern pc

where did you buy your USB to serial adapter? I recently got one of these as a gift and was wondering where I could buy a cable that can work with a newer computer.

just buy extension for main pc it installs in pcie