If there’s one thing everyone hated about Windows 98, was the lack of USB4.0 support. We remember vividly the cries of anguish at the launch party when we found out …. We remember vividly the cries of anguish at the launch party when we found out that 21 years in the future, the operating system wouldn’t support the then-undreamt of speeds of the thunderbolt-based fastest USB protocol.
After two decades of living with this crushing disappointment, [Yeo Kheng Meng] has delivered the goods: the most modern of USB interfaces on some very much not modern versions of windows. This builds on [Yeo Kheng Meng]’s work on xHCI drivers for USB2.0 support, which we covered at the time. Like that hack, this one applies to Windows 98 through 7, and has a similar level of LLM-wrangling involved.
There are actually a few parts to it– one is a USB3.0 driver, which replaces the old xHCI98 driver and is available on GitHub. On Windows98, USB3.0 speed caps out around 200 MB/s, likely restricted by Windows98’s maximum request limit of 64kB on USB transfers. Even with the faster bus in action, it can only gobble those tiny blocks of data so fast.
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