Win95 OSR2 or newer is supposed to have USB support, but I tried this yesterday and I couldn't get it to work. The problem was the USB PCI card I was using only had drivers going back to Win98, and they weren't accepted by 95 (weirdly it would pick them up, but I could click "finish" as many times as I wanted after selecting the driver and nothing would happen.)

I think what you are doing could be possible, so long as you can find USB drivers for Windows 95 that work with your USB controller.

I do have drivers for the USB ports- it's a 1997 Dell, DX233? Something akin to that. First model that shipped with AGP, has a Riva 128 and an AWE64.
The problem is I can't find any generic drivers for KB/M at all, which seems odd. Flash drives? Sure. KB/M? NO!

You're not the first one to have these issues. I recall another member was hunting for HID drivers a while back as well, but I don't think he was very successful.

Btw, I think the BIOS disables the Legacy USB support when the OS loas its USB stack.

To hunt for a driver need to know what the chip is.
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The guy quit the project in 2014. This is from the Wayback Machine.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120218200555/ht … USB%20Guide.htm

PCBONEZ wrote:

To hunt for a driver need to know what the chip is.
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The problem is not the motherboard drivers- that's all installed and full supported. The problem is a lack of USB keyboard drivers.
I don't even know why MSFT bothered to make win95 """"support"""""" USB if it was this shitty.

Guess they never bothered with HID drivers when they developed this USB support because it wasn't very important back then. I have a Compaq PC that shipped with Win98 where the BIOS had no Legacy USB support, and another MVP3 board (well into Win98 territory) that had very basic legacy support (keyboard only, and not without its faults). USB input devices were just not a big thing back when Win95 versions with USB support were released.

Sounds like the only option is to try to find Win95 drivers for an early USB keyboard, in the hope that they were HID drivers. Maybe Logitech has something?

You may have to alter the driver .inf files though, to make them respond to generic HID class devices rather than the manufacturer's own devices. I guess manually picking the driver and attaching it to the USB keyboard would work for testing, but if you could turn it into a class driver that would be much more flexible.

SRQ wrote:

PCBONEZ wrote:

To hunt for a driver need to know what the chip is.
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The problem is not the motherboard drivers- that's all installed and full supported. The problem is a lack of USB keyboard drivers.
I don't even know why MSFT bothered to make win95 """"support"""""" USB if it was this shitty.

Keyboard drivers were the responsibility of the keyboard manufacturers, not Microshaft.
Same as mouse drivers, web-cam drivers, chipset drivers or anything else.
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Believe it or not USB keyboards have chips in them.
You need to know what it is to find a compatible driver.
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You could do what I do and avoid the whole problem by using PS/2 ports for mouse/keyboard.
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PCBONEZ wrote:

Believe it or not USB keyboards have chips in them.
You need to know what it is to find a compatible driver.

Unless the keyboard is a weird one, it should adhere to the HID standard and therefore be covered by the generic drivers present in Windows 98 and beyond. And since Windows has shipped with the generic HID drivers since then, many mice/keyboards do not ship with specific drivers. And the ones that do, unless they are old enough, will probably not bother with Windows 95 (non WDM) support.

alexanrs wrote:

PCBONEZ wrote:

Believe it or not USB keyboards have chips in them.
You need to know what it is to find a compatible driver.

Unless the keyboard is a weird one, it should adhere to the HID standard and therefore be covered by the generic drivers present in Windows 98 and beyond. And since Windows has shipped with the generic HID drivers since then, many mice/keyboards do not ship with specific drivers. And the ones that do, unless they are old enough, will probably not bother with Windows 95 (non WDM) support.

The OP is trying to get USB working with W95 which makes what happened with W98 irrelevant.
Even then, 'generic' drivers (WDM or not) originally come from the manufacturers who submit them to MS for inclusion in the OS.

Even generic drivers are dependent in the chip(s).
The PCI\VEN_xxxx&DEV_xxxx for chips compatible with said driver is buried in the driver somewhere.

For W95 the manufacturer would be responsible for USB keyboard drivers because they were not standardized or accepted by MS yet.
- ALL USB keyboards were weird ones when it comes to W95.
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You could do what I do and avoid the whole problem by using PS/2 ports for mouse/keyboard.
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USB has something called a Class driver. There is no need to specify the exact VID/PID in generic drivers if they adhere to a standard supported by a class driver installed, but that also allows for specific drivers (which do specify the VID/PID) to be installed without conflicting with the generic one. That is what the OP needs unless there are specific drivers for his chip, which I guess do not exist.

IMHO if one really needs USB, Windows 98 is the way to go. And even then I found using USB keyboards and mice to have some issues in some machines I have in pure DOS + legacy support.

This is an an Apple wired keyboard- I do some writing now and then on DOS and I just love how this keyboard feels. (Using a different computer running 98)
98SE recognizes the keyboard just fine as a standard 102 key keyboard, is there really no HID for 95? I'm kinda sad since that's the original OS of this specific machine, and it's got that whole nostalgic attachment thing going on.

SRQ wrote:

is there really no HID for 95?

The closest there is is in the Wayback Machine link I posted earlier.
Or this: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/172402-xusbsu … indows-95-osr2/
For either you have to have the correct version of W95 installed.
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This package does not provide a driver for USB-HID or USB peripheral devices such as keyboards, mice, or joysticks.

cry

SRQ wrote:

This package does not provide a driver for USB-HID or USB peripheral devices such as keyboards, mice, or joysticks.

cry

And I don't think Apple was into making Windows drivers for their parts in 1995.

I just said silly it works and is recognized in 98 as a generic 102 key keyboard. It works just fine with HID, even works fine under pure DOS with legacy USB.
I wish these stupid USB- PS/2 dongles worked with it, either they're fried or it doesn't like them.

USB->PS2 dongles are just passive adapters. They only work if the keyboard itself is compatible with the PS/2 protocol.

Its not silly at all. USB was in its infancy when MS released Windows 95 2.1/2.5 (USB 1.0), and even then they probably only did it as a stopgap measure for OEMs (they couldn't exactly put out PCs with USB ports without a system that supports them) until Windows 98. The final USB standard wasn't even out before Windows 95 RTM was released.

W95 doesn't have HID thus Apple would have had to write a w95 driver for it.

Are your dongles the ones with actual bridge chips?