One of my recent dumpster finds was a P200-MMX machine with USB headers on its 430TX based AT motherboard. I'm guessing it's USB 1.0. When I hooked up a USB bracket so that I could copy some files from a flash drive, it (Win2k) just threw USB device malfunction errors.

All of my 440BX boards (I'm guessing they're USB 1.1) work just fine with that flash drive.

As far as I remember, the only meaningful change is to the power management. If you take a look at the 1.1 spec, you will see some weird bit designations in the descriptors related to power.
Otherwise virtually identical.

Right, I think support for mass storage devices was introduced in USB 1.1. The oldest machine I have with USB is from 1998 and is USB 1.1.

I see that USB 1.0 didn't support extension cables and hubs due to timing and power issues. This was fixed in USB 1.1.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

One of my recent dumpster finds was a P200-MMX machine with USB headers on its 430TX based AT motherboard. I'm guessing it's USB 1.0.

No I suspect it's paired with a PIIX4 which is UHCI revision 1.1.

What's more likely the issue is that back then different motherboards used different pinouts for the internal USB headers and it's not what you expected. My Tyan S2466 uses an unusual pinout and that's 2001 vintage

The differences can be read on Wikipedia. The most important thing to know is, however, that almost no device supports USB 1.0. No matter how old a USB device is, chances are 99% that it requires at least USB 1.1 to work. USB 1.0 was pretty much ignored back then.

So what mobos were actually produced with USB 1.0? I'm now curious to get my hands on one.

I remember in 1997 or 1998 and perhaps even 1996 most of us had (USB 1.0?) ports in our PCs for months or perhaps years already. Sometimes just pin headers on motherboards rather than actual ports and these rarely worked when actual devices came up.

Back then everybody was hungry for actual peripherals. This was time period when pretty much any new USB product even a shitty mouse was eagerly welcomed and thoroughly reviewed by press.

It wasn't until when Bill Gates famously crashed his PC by connecting a scanner during Windows 98 demo when things started moving. Perhaps that was when USB standard moved to 1.1. Devices were still rare, appearing mostly on trade shows rather than in stores, but at least they worked when you finally later got them.

I remember upgrading to a USB keyboard in early 1999. It was vastly inferior to the PS/2 one I used before in every possible way and I still had to keep a PS/2 just in case I wanted to do something in the BIOS setup, but it was finally USB!

Errius wrote:

So what mobos were actually produced with USB 1.0? I'm now curious to get my hands on one.

In practice it looks like it's a question of what chipset the board uses. All boards I've checked that got a supporting chipset also got the needed peripheral circuitry. Strangely enough though, on a couple of them, the circuitry and connector header was there, but the actual pins was missing. Easy enough to solder in though.

I believe 430HX is the oldest Intel chipset to have USB 1.0 support, assuming anything newer got it too, which would mean everything in the i430 series except FX. The 440 series got USB 1.1.

kaputnik wrote:

I believe 430HX is the oldest Intel chipset to have USB 1.0 support

The 430HX is a northbridge and it's the southbridge you need to check, so PIIX3 and PIIX4.

Looking at the attached datasheets then the PIIX3 just says USB, the PIIX4 says USB 1.0, but I have motherboards with revision 01 PIIX4 that are USB 1.1 so I suspect later revisions of the PIIX4 changed from 1.0 to 1.1.

If you want a motherboard with USB 1.0 then I suspect your need one with a PIIX3 or a revision 00 PIIX4.

red-ray wrote:

kaputnik wrote:

I believe 430HX is the oldest Intel chipset to have USB 1.0 support

The 430HX is a northbridge and it's the southbridge you need to check, so PIIX3 and PIIX4.

Well, technically the 430HX or Intel 820430HX is a chip_SET_. Consisting of north bridge (82439HX) and south bridge (82371SB or PIIX3) chips.

I would assume external chips were used before it went to any mainstream chipset.

As for the USB 1.0. There were also pre-1.0 implementations AFAIK.

It looks like there were no major feature differences between 1.0 and 1.1. Just erratas. Most likely early 1.x implementations were declaring whatever early spec was available at the time. There should be no practical differences other than bugs of different PIIX3 revisions.

There were also two competing driver implementations Compaq backed OHCI and Intel's UHCI at the time.

mpe wrote:

red-ray wrote:

kaputnik wrote:

I believe 430HX is the oldest Intel chipset to have USB 1.0 support

The 430HX is a northbridge and it's the southbridge you need to check, so PIIX3 and PIIX4.

Well, technically the 430HX or Intel 820430HX is a chip_SET_. Consisting of north bridge (82439HX) and south bridge (82371SB or PIIX3) chips.

Technically the 430HX could be paired with a PIIX4 and suspect there are some motherboards with this setup, though I don't know of one.

I do have a MSI MS-6742 which has the Intel 82865PE northbridge paired with an Intel 82801DB (ICH4) southbridge when it's usually an Intel 82801EB (ICH5) so I am 100 % sure you can't infer the southbridge from the northbridge.

As the USB controller is within the southbridge then obviously that is what should be specified.

My point was that 430HX (Triton II) isn't a north bridge, but a marketing name for a combination of chips delivering certain feature set. (incl. ECC RAM, EDO, PCI, USB, Ultra-DMA, number of CPUs, power management features...). In this case it is 82439HX + 82371SB. Thus the 430HX cannot be paired with anything. Only the 82439HX can (but I have serious doubts about that). And the result wouldn't necessarily produce a 430HX.

In this period of time we had a distinct northbridge/southbridge marriage. But it wasn't always that easy. Before or after the 430HX.

mpe wrote:

Thus the 430HX cannot be paired with anything. Only the 82439HX can (but I have serious doubts about that). And the result wouldn't necessarily produce a 430HX.

Given http://209.68.14.80/ref/mbsys/mobo/compChipset-c.html I feel otherwise.

Either way by talking in terms of PIIX3 (82371SB) and P11X4 (82371AB) it would be far clearer.

There are definitely compatibility and power issues with USB 1.0. I have an Intel PD440FX with USB 1.0 and have disabled it as a result of trying to use a usb keyboard with the thing. Not only did the usb keyboard not work, the motherboard went bonkers and I couldn't get any keyboard to work, including a ps/2. Only after clearing the cmos did everything work again.

hello, i have ACER V35 with intel 82439HX, and 82371AB, and i have problem to get that USB onboard working, on board is standard 8pin header, so i added USB bracket, 5V is OK, but windows 98 SE didnt recognize that usb controller, it is possible that it is USB 1.0 ? and i have problem to get it work ... any IDEA or DRIVER for that usb controller ballast? 😁

Better install a USB 2.0 card. When I build my P1 MMX 200 system, I used an HX-based mainboard as well (A-Trend ATC-2000). Yes, it has USB 1.0. And there's no way to get it working. I had no issues with Windows detecting it, but I wasn't able to find any USB device that worked. Even very old stuff seems to require USB 1.1 at least (1.0 and 1.1 were quite different and are not compatible - a device must specifically support it). I gave up on it, installed a USB 2.0 card and NUSB, and all is working fine now.

p1p1p1 wrote on 2020-03-29, 16:22:

hello, i have ACER V35 with intel 82439HX, and 82371AB

are you 100% sure that this is your northbridge/southbridge combination? 82371AB is PIIX4 which normally comes with 430TX, and every 430HX board i've seen comes with 82371SB aka PIIX3. and unless there were some unmarked changes on the same southbridge i'm not convinced by the theories on chipset revisions thrown around in this thread as usb works both on my GA-586HX and 586TX3 boards, mouse and usb drives (via NUSB).

however USB support was considered preliminary on 1996 boards so issues on some of those early boards are conceivable, possibly even down to wiring. and i've seen remarks about USB support in BIOS updates for such boards, so this is something else to consider.

ok i check up chip and there is 82371SB , there is no option in bios about USB, so i added OPTI USB PCI CARD and ... nothing, USB not found 😁 so i tried VIA, other PCI slot, nothing, ...
it is acer V35 bios V2.0, i think there is no bios update for this board. i have tried also NUSB, nothing works.

NUSB works with USB 2.0 only.

You mean none of the add-on cards you tried were even detected? Then there's a serious problem with the PCI bus... PCI uses bus enumeration and it's impossible for a card not being detected.