[Andy A.]

I'll just offer that the ports are actually fairly easy to resolder.

If you have someone on the team who is pretty competent with a soldering iron, all you need is a new port (you can buy them) and a method of sucking out the old solder and broken pins. As long as theres no damage to the PCB in the first place, it's pretty straight forward. I've done it before on the tether port. Interestingly, we didn't have the exact same port design. So the one we put in didn't bend 90 degrees like the original. Instead of pointing in the same direction as all the other ports, the new one pointed straight up. This was actually an improvement, since it made plugging in a tether worlds easier.

Back to the point-

I don't have a C based controller, but I do have an old P-Basic version. Assuming you have a matching OI, it should be fully able to run the 'bots basic functions (motors, pneumatics, simple sensors). It will of course require a complete code rewrite and isn't nearly as powerful in autonomous (or anytime really).

But, it'll be cheap!

-Andy A.