jverne/nqc

NQC (Not Quite C) is a programming language for several LEGO MINDSTORMS products including the RCX, CyberMaster, and Scout.

nqc's Issues

Need API commenting via Doxygen

While I learn the code-base, add Doxygen API comments. Once I have enough, add some targets to the Makefile to generate the API docs.

Windows 10 Support

Do I dare try to get this working in Windows 10? The USB support alone might be a quagmire.

It probably needs to be native Windows support, and not through WSL or MinGW.

Figure out why firmware uploading appears to fail

No matter what mode I put the tower in, -firmfast fails. It starts to upload, issues a series of tones and a beep-beep, and then uploads again until it reports a failure:

3402% ./bin/nqc -firmfast firmware/firm0332.lgo
Downloading firmware:...............................................................................................................................................................................................
No reply from RCX
3402 (253)%

Subsequent commands indicate there is no firmware.

Only fails sometimes, so there seems to be a timing bug somewhere. Maybe where I took out the wait/pause stuff in the OS X specific USB send code?

Get a proper logging macro into the core code

Lift a logger macro from one of my other project and shove it into NQC. verbose printf is getting old.

Get rcxspy building and working

Either abandon rcxspy or get it working. It exercises some of the disassembly stuff in RCXlib which is nice, but it looks like it has languished a bit. RCX_Image also does some weird stuff with a char array. Either convert this to use safe string functions or use a C++ string object.

Investigate string safety corners with strcat/strcpy, snprintf

There are a few places where we accept things like strings of directories and hope it fits in a 1024-byte bag. May as well guard against those and squelch the compiler warnings about unsafe use of str*

Switch usages of strlcpy and strlcat to more cross-compatible methods

When compiling this under Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) using Ubuntu, I was able to get this to compile using the following steps:

1. Install the build tool chain and the dependencies:

sudo apt install build-essential bison flex

2. Patch nqc/DirList.cpp to replace strlcpy() and strlcat() with strncpy() and strcat() respectively. Usage of sizeof() worked to at least compile bin/nqc. Here's the git diff showing the patched lines. (Note: I'm not sure this is the right way, but it should be close... I think???)

diff --git a/nqc/DirList.cpp b/nqc/DirList.cpp
index 766b2b4..6bccc93 100644
--- a/nqc/DirList.cpp
+++ b/nqc/DirList.cpp
@@ -53,7 +53,7 @@ bool DirList::Find(const char *filename, char *pathname)
     struct stat stat_buf;

     size_t len = sizeof(pathname);
-    if (strlcpy(pathname, filename, len) >= len) {
+    if (sizeof(strncpy(pathname, filename, len)) >= len) {
         return false;
     }

@@ -61,8 +61,8 @@ bool DirList::Find(const char *filename, char *pathname)
         return true;

     for(Entry *e = fEntries.GetHead(); e; e=e->GetNext()) {
-        if (strlcpy(pathname, e->GetPath(), len) < len) {
-            if (strlcat(pathname, filename, len) < len) {
+        if (sizeof(strncpy(pathname, e->GetPath(), len)) < len) {
+            if (sizeof(strncat(pathname, filename, len)) < len) {
                 if (stat(pathname, &stat_buf) == 0) {
                     return true;
                 }

3. Run make from the root of the repository
4. Run bin/nqc

If this sounds acceptable, I'll open a PR for the change.

Raspberry Pi support

Porting my work to Raspberry Pi running some sort of Linux should be doable.