I mainly want to repack the contents back into an installable executable just like NUSB 3.6 - I'll see if making an SFX archive does the trick to make it installable, thanks for the tip.

It seems that swapping drivers with known working XP SP1 driver versions is insufficient - I think perhaps that NTKERN.VXD only stubbing some export functions and not actual implementations might be to blame for these BSODs.

Can someone who owns this check it for the slow down problem?

Thread here would be interested to know
Socket 7 board help

HELLO USERS. PLEASE SOMEBODY FROM HERE INCLUDE A LINK TO A USB 1.1 OR USB 2.0 CHIPSET FOR A PCI SLOT TO BE COMPATIBLE WITH A WINDOWS MILLENNIUM HP VLi8 DESKTOP COMPUTER FROM 1997. I DON’T WANT TO LOOK FOR IT BY MYSELF BECAUSE I MIGHT GET THE WRONG ONE.

Duffman wrote on 2022-12-02, 14:48:

I mainly want to repack the contents back into an installable executable just like NUSB 3.6 - I'll see if making an SFX archive does the trick to make it installable, thanks for the tip.

It seems that swapping drivers with known working XP SP1 driver versions is insufficient - I think perhaps that NTKERN.VXD only stubbing some export functions and not actual implementations might be to blame for these BSODs.

beachboy1122 wrote on 2023-01-19, 07:06:

HELLO USERS. PLEASE SOMEBODY FROM HERE INCLUDE A LINK TO A USB 1.1 OR USB 2.0 CHIPSET FOR A PCI SLOT TO BE COMPATIBLE WITH A WINDOWS MILLENNIUM HP VLi8 DESKTOP COMPUTER FROM 1997. I DON’T WANT TO LOOK FOR IT BY MYSELF BECAUSE I MIGHT GET THE WRONG ONE.

Duffman wrote on 2022-12-02, 14:48:

I mainly want to repack the contents back into an installable executable just like NUSB 3.6 - I'll see if making an SFX archive does the trick to make it installable, thanks for the tip.

It seems that swapping drivers with known working XP SP1 driver versions is insufficient - I think perhaps that NTKERN.VXD only stubbing some export functions and not actual implementations might be to blame for these BSODs.

@group: all the usb2.0 cards I have tried have slowed down the system. But have worked.

Are there any usb 2.0 that don’t slow the system down?

I don’t have any usb 1.x cards to try. Do they slow the system down?

@beachboy, I have heard of people having success with the slow down issue by disabling it in device manager. Perhaps an option in leu of a non slowing card?

@whomsoever
nec "d720102gc" driver

I got this but still haven’t tested it. Been busy.

You need to expand upon what exactly is a “slow down issue.” That’s a terribly vague term.

Sphere478 wrote on 2023-01-19, 07:13:

@group: all the usb2.0 cards I have tried have slowed down the system. But have worked. […]
Show full quote

beachboy1122 wrote on 2023-01-19, 07:06:

HELLO USERS. PLEASE SOMEBODY FROM HERE INCLUDE A LINK TO A USB 1.1 OR USB 2.0 CHIPSET FOR A PCI SLOT TO BE COMPATIBLE WITH A WINDOWS MILLENNIUM HP VLi8 DESKTOP COMPUTER FROM 1997. I DON’T WANT TO LOOK FOR IT BY MYSELF BECAUSE I MIGHT GET THE WRONG ONE.

Duffman wrote on 2022-12-02, 14:48:

I mainly want to repack the contents back into an installable executable just like NUSB 3.6 - I'll see if making an SFX archive does the trick to make it installable, thanks for the tip.

It seems that swapping drivers with known working XP SP1 driver versions is insufficient - I think perhaps that NTKERN.VXD only stubbing some export functions and not actual implementations might be to blame for these BSODs.

@group: all the usb2.0 cards I have tried have slowed down the system. But have worked.

Are there any usb 2.0 that don’t slow the system down?

I don’t have any usb 1.x cards to try. Do they slow the system down?

@beachboy, I have heard of people having success with the slow down issue by disabling it in device manager. Perhaps an option in leu of a non slowing card?

@whomsoever
nec "d720102gc" driver

I got this but still haven’t tested it. Been busy.

Someone has made some Win9x USB patches here -

http://sweetlow.orgfree.com/download/

They might resolve your issue.

beachboy1122 wrote on 2023-01-19, 09:38:

You need to expand upon what exactly is a “slow down issue.” That’s a terribly vague term.

Sphere478 wrote on 2023-01-19, 07:13:

@group: all the usb2.0 cards I have tried have slowed down the system. But have worked. […]
Show full quote

beachboy1122 wrote on 2023-01-19, 07:06:

HELLO USERS. PLEASE SOMEBODY FROM HERE INCLUDE A LINK TO A USB 1.1 OR USB 2.0 CHIPSET FOR A PCI SLOT TO BE COMPATIBLE WITH A WINDOWS MILLENNIUM HP VLi8 DESKTOP COMPUTER FROM 1997. I DON’T WANT TO LOOK FOR IT BY MYSELF BECAUSE I MIGHT GET THE WRONG ONE.

@group: all the usb2.0 cards I have tried have slowed down the system. But have worked.

Are there any usb 2.0 that don’t slow the system down?

I don’t have any usb 1.x cards to try. Do they slow the system down?

@beachboy, I have heard of people having success with the slow down issue by disabling it in device manager. Perhaps an option in leu of a non slowing card?

@whomsoever
nec "d720102gc" driver

I got this but still haven’t tested it. Been busy.

3d mark going from 800 to 500 😀 (if my memory isn’t failing me)

Sphere478 wrote on 2023-01-19, 07:13:

@group: all the usb2.0 cards I have tried have slowed down the system. But have worked. […]
Show full quote

@group: all the usb2.0 cards I have tried have slowed down the system. But have worked.

Are there any usb 2.0 that don’t slow the system down?

I don’t have any usb 1.x cards to try. Do they slow the system down?

@beachboy, I have heard of people having success with the slow down issue by disabling it in device manager. Perhaps an option in leu of a non slowing card?

@whomsoever
nec "d720102gc" driver

I got this but still haven’t tested it. Been busy.

Doesn't a major slowdown kind of make sense here, though? If you look up the lists of bandwidths by interface type on Wikipedia, then consider the two following entries in particular:

• PCI 32-bit/33 MHz : 1067 Mbit/s (133.33 MB/s)
• USB 2.0 high speed: 480 Mbit/s (60 MB/s)

Which means that USB 2.0 takes up to almost half of the bandwidth available to the legacy PCI bus (32-bit 33MHz, what was commonly available in older consumer motherboards). And since the PCI bandwidth has to be shared with other stuff on the bus, notably the disk controllers , and in pre-AGP systems also the graphics card, yeah, that should lead to noticeable slowdowns.

Does the installation of the card by itself already cause a dramatic slowdown, before you even plug in anything? Or do you only notice this slowdown when, for instance, you have a an SSD in a USB 2.0 high speed enclosure hooked up to it, maxing out the USB 2.0 bandwidth?

I wonder if most (if not all?) USB 2.0 chipsets work in such a way that they always "claim" or "reserve" the full 480 Mbit/s from the PCI bus, even when the USB devices connected to the USB 2.0 controller don't necessary take up all that bandwidth, or when none are connected at all. I'm not knowledgeable enough to answer that question, but I'm sure others here are.

By the way, I have this old Sun Blade 150 UltraSPARC IIe workstation at my Dad's house, which I've been wanting to pimp out to well beyond what it was designed for, just to see how much I can squeeze out of that thing. Among other things, I was thinking about upgrading it with a USB 2.0 card, or perhaps even a USB 3.0 card through a PCIe-to-legacy-PCI adapter, since its integrated USB ports are 1.x.

(In case you were wondering if the USB 3.0 drivers of any OS would even work on the Sparc architecture, I'd be counting on NetBSD's device driver architecture, which is designed to be platform- and architecture-neutral from the ground up by design.)

But if the insertion of such a card always leads to an inevitable overall slowdown of the host system, regardless of what devices are connected to it, then that would pretty much defeat the purpose.

There are pci usb 3.0 cards with windows xp drivers. I would have to check again, but I don’t think it slows the system down? I have one, (Need to check)

digger wrote on 2023-01-21, 11:10:

Doesn't a major slowdown kind of make sense here, though? If you look up the lists of bandwidths by interface type on Wikipedia, […]
Show full quote

Sphere478 wrote on 2023-01-19, 07:13:

@group: all the usb2.0 cards I have tried have slowed down the system. But have worked. […]
Show full quote

@group: all the usb2.0 cards I have tried have slowed down the system. But have worked.

Are there any usb 2.0 that don’t slow the system down?

I don’t have any usb 1.x cards to try. Do they slow the system down?

@beachboy, I have heard of people having success with the slow down issue by disabling it in device manager. Perhaps an option in leu of a non slowing card?

@whomsoever
nec "d720102gc" driver

I got this but still haven’t tested it. Been busy.

Doesn't a major slowdown kind of make sense here, though? If you look up the lists of bandwidths by interface type on Wikipedia, then consider the two following entries in particular:

• PCI 32-bit/33 MHz : 1067 Mbit/s (133.33 MB/s)
• USB 2.0 high speed: 480 Mbit/s (60 MB/s)

Which means that USB 2.0 takes up to almost half of the bandwidth available to the legacy PCI bus (32-bit 33MHz, what was commonly available in older consumer motherboards). And since the PCI bandwidth has to be shared with other stuff on the bus, notably the disk controllers , and in pre-AGP systems also the graphics card, yeah, that should lead to noticeable slowdowns.

Does the installation of the card by itself already cause a dramatic slowdown, before you even plug in anything? Or do you only notice this slowdown when, for instance, you have a an SSD in a USB 2.0 high speed enclosure hooked up to it, maxing out the USB 2.0 bandwidth?

I wonder if most (if not all?) USB 2.0 chipsets work in such a way that they always "claim" or "reserve" the full 480 Mbit/s from the PCI bus, even when the USB devices connected to the USB 2.0 controller don't necessary take up all that bandwidth, or when none are connected at all. I'm not knowledgeable enough to answer that question, but I'm sure others here are.

They slow down the system just by being installed. I’m not going benchmarks while copying files 🤣. :p that would make sense if that was the problem.

No, just by being installed they slow the system down.

One of my motherboards will periodically wreck its automatic BIOS configuration by running out of resources with a USB 2.0 card installed. This is an Intel 440BX board, Slot 1 Coppermine, nothing special, with Intel BIOS. There seems to be no "consistent" configuration. Sometimes it will just start screaming at boot about "resource conflicts" and the USB card won't function properly.

Sometimes it gets so bad that I need to reset the BIOS. I don't know what it's doing or why it has such a hard time, but these older boards seem to really dislike USB 2.0.

I haven't done extensive testing, but on this board at least, removing a USB drive after choosing to "safely remove" will almost always hard lock the system. This is with Windows ME, so there is no monkey patching like with Windows 98. It's just plain unstable.

The USB card is a known-good NEC controller with the latest NEC drivers for the chip. I tried other cards as well in this motherboard with the same result.

You could try the patched USB 2.0 drivers here -

http://sweetlow.orgfree.com/download/

see if they make a difference to your system.

Those are all patches for Windows 98. Windows ME has support built-in, which makes the instability even stranger.

@Kahenraz

These USB 2.0 drivers appear to be patched XP USB 2.0 drivers, so if they work for 98 I'd imagine they'd work fine for ME.

I use a VIA VT6212L in my P3 Dell XPS T550 with a 440BX board. It seems to work great with great transfer speeds. I used the drivers from the VIA site. But it definitely seems to pull down system resources while doing file transfers.

Okay, so apparently USB 2.0 cards consist of an EHCI interface for USB 2.0 devices, coupled with either an UHCI or an OHCI interface for downwards compatibility with USB 1.x devices.

And if I understand the differences between UHCI and OHCI correctly, I would have to try get a USB 2.0 card with a chipset other than Intel or VIA for my Sun Blade 150, since UHCI probably wouldn't work in non-x86 systems. (Also, OHCI is supposedly more efficient, since it handles more in dedicated hardware.) So I assume that narrows it down to cards with a NEC chipset, right? Or are there USB 2.0 cards with any other chipsets that are known to work with non-x86 architectures?

The newer xHCI interface, introduced with USB 3.0, does away with all that and offers a single unified interface for USB devices of any generation, and is apparently architecture-neutral as well. But are there any USB 3.x cards in existence that fit in a legacy PCI slot? And if not, has anybody had any success with getting a USB 3.x PCIe card to work in a legacy PCI slot, through use of an adapter?

I know there's probably no way we'd get xHCI to work in any Windows version older than XP at the very least, but again, this is for a Sparc-based machine that I'll be trying with NetBSD.

StarTech has USB 3.0 cards for PCI slots. Of note to others, there are no Windows 9x drivers for these cards.

I did mentions this card before...

I would recommend form Startech the PCI-E to USB 2.0 card using the classic VIA 6212 chipset. This PCI-E card it's recognized in Windows 98 with default drivers, works also in Windows 95 OSR2. (tested)

I mean not everyday you can find a PCI-E hardware that works from Windows 95 to Windows 11.

Can confirm, usb 3.0 to 32 bit 5v pci is a thing. I have one. Windows xp/2k is as old as os support gets. NT might work? But no 9x

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-01-22, 18:48:

StarTech has USB 3.0 cards for PCI slots. Of note to others, there are no Windows 9x drivers for these cards.

Indeed, thanks for pointing it out. They're expensive, though!

Hopefully they can be had elsewhere for more reasonable prices, pre-owned for instance.

Any other brands that released USB 3.0 cards for legacy PCI slots?