TechieDude wrote on 2020-04-22, 20:08:

NUSB works just fine with USB 1.0 as well. Just tried it on another 430TX board (QDI P5I430TX Titanium IB+). The other board I had was a DFI 586ITBD Rev.A1.

People forget there were USB win printers and usb win scanners available in 1997 (I vaguely remember a usb scanner in 96)

I bought several for quite cheap near the end of year because I didn’t want to pay the extra for an actual “good” standard printer or scanner.

Getting usb devices installed into windows 95c was a god aweful experience (and honestly it could be god awful in 98)

I remember that there was a whole long procedure that had to be followed exactly to get the usb motherboard /os driver working followed by a pre installation driver before you rebooted and attached the scanner once in windows, you then had to reboot again with everything powered for it to properly detect and link up.

I remember having to clean install windows, usb support and the multi part scanner environment multiple times before I could get it to actually scan anything other than a blank screen.
If you just attached the scanner and installed the driver it trashed things and you couldn’t uninstall requiring a fresh installation of windows.

Wonderful times.

Oh and the only difference I could find between USB 1.0 and USB 1.1 was that passive usb hubs (remember those) had warnings that 1.0 wouldn’t work reliably , things that drew power directly from the port would sometimes also have a warning about damage on 1.0 but were fine on 1.1.

Basically usb 1.1 had better power delivery, “charging support”, support of multiple devices and hubs, in other words mostly bug fixes so 1.1 wasn’t a monolithic single device at a time port.

rmay635703 wrote on Yesterday, 03:58:

People forget there were USB win printers and usb win scanners available in 1997 (I vaguely remember a usb scanner in 96) […]
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TechieDude wrote on 2020-04-22, 20:08:

NUSB works just fine with USB 1.0 as well. Just tried it on another 430TX board (QDI P5I430TX Titanium IB+). The other board I had was a DFI 586ITBD Rev.A1.

People forget there were USB win printers and usb win scanners available in 1997 (I vaguely remember a usb scanner in 96)

I bought several for quite cheap near the end of year because I didn’t want to pay the extra for an actual “good” standard printer or scanner.

Getting usb devices installed into windows 95c was a god aweful experience (and honestly it could be god awful in 98)

I remember that there was a whole long procedure that had to be followed exactly to get the usb motherboard /os driver working followed by a pre installation driver before you rebooted and attached the scanner once in windows, you then had to reboot again with everything powered for it to properly detect and link up.

I remember having to clean install windows, usb support and the multi part scanner environment multiple times before I could get it to actually scan anything other than a blank screen.
If you just attached the scanner and installed the driver it trashed things and you couldn’t uninstall requiring a fresh installation of windows.

Wonderful times.

Oh and the only difference I could find between USB 1.0 and USB 1.1 was that passive usb hubs (remember those) had warnings that 1.0 wouldn’t work reliably , things that drew power directly from the port would sometimes also have a warning about damage on 1.0 but were fine on 1.1.

Basically usb 1.1 had better power delivery, “charging support”, support of multiple devices and hubs, in other words mostly bug fixes so 1.1 wasn’t a monolithic single device at a time port.

That's quite a lengthy rant, but the reason I mentioned NUSB with USB1.0 was because I use flash drives with win9x. In fact, all I ever use with USB on win9x is flash drives, gamepads and occasionally mice.

yeokm1 wrote on 2026-10-05, 06:56:

Thanks for mentioning my project. I'm proud to say as of now, I got full USB 3.0 support working on Win98! […]
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Jo22 wrote on 2026-09-23, 23:55:

Hi again, after so many years there's an update on the situation. https://github.com/yeokm1/xhci98 https://www.youtube.com/watch […]
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hyoenmadan wrote on 2020-03-30, 15:33:

Imposible. XHCI, the specification for usb3+, makes use of hardware and software facilites only modern hardware and OSs like NT6+, OSX and Linux offer.
ACTUALLY USB2 is already hard to retrofit, supporting only Win98+ and not all older boards take the cards.

Hi again, after so many years there's an update on the situation.
https://github.com/yeokm1/xhci98
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SOyvvC7P4E

Long story short, it's about getting USB 3.0 controllers working on 98SE.
For the time being, at USB 2.0 speed only. But it's a start. 😀

Edit: Sorry for being a bit off-topic here, but I thought it might be relevant to USB history.

Thanks for mentioning my project. I'm proud to say as of now, I got full USB 3.0 support working on Win98!

Caveats though, this driver is still very early and USB 3.x standards/devices span a huge range so appreciate any issue/bug reports to help me improve it if you use it.

https://github.com/yeokm1/xhci98/releases/

You're welcome. Thank you very much for the good work, too! 😎
- It gives hope for Windows 98 still being around and being fully functional in our modern days, IMHO.

TechieDude wrote on Yesterday, 16:05:

rmay635703 wrote on Yesterday, 03:58:

People forget there were USB win printers and usb win scanners available in 1997 (I vaguely remember a usb scanner in 96) […]
Show full quote

TechieDude wrote on 2020-04-22, 20:08:

NUSB works just fine with USB 1.0 as well. Just tried it on another 430TX board (QDI P5I430TX Titanium IB+). The other board I had was a DFI 586ITBD Rev.A1.

People forget there were USB win printers and usb win scanners available in 1997 (I vaguely remember a usb scanner in 96)

I bought several for quite cheap near the end of year because I didn’t want to pay the extra for an actual “good” standard printer or scanner.

Getting usb devices installed into windows 95c was a god aweful experience (and honestly it could be god awful in 98)

I remember that there was a whole long procedure that had to be followed exactly to get the usb motherboard /os driver working followed by a pre installation driver before you rebooted and attached the scanner once in windows, you then had to reboot again with everything powered for it to properly detect and link up.

I remember having to clean install windows, usb support and the multi part scanner environment multiple times before I could get it to actually scan anything other than a blank screen.
If you just attached the scanner and installed the driver it trashed things and you couldn’t uninstall requiring a fresh installation of windows.

Wonderful times.

Oh and the only difference I could find between USB 1.0 and USB 1.1 was that passive usb hubs (remember those) had warnings that 1.0 wouldn’t work reliably , things that drew power directly from the port would sometimes also have a warning about damage on 1.0 but were fine on 1.1.

Basically usb 1.1 had better power delivery, “charging support”, support of multiple devices and hubs, in other words mostly bug fixes so 1.1 wasn’t a monolithic single device at a time port.

That's quite a lengthy rant, but the reason I mentioned NUSB with USB1.0 was because I use flash drives with win9x. In fact, all I ever use with USB on win9x is flash drives, gamepads and occasionally mice.

Hi, interestingly, basic input devices such as standard USB keyboard/mice are still using USB 1.x (12 mbit/s) because the data rate used by them is so low.
Special gaming keyboard/mice with displays etc are a different matter, though.
They may try to use USB 2.0 or higher, not sure.

About early USB scanners, I do remember that they often had an additional parallel port, as well.
Probably for Windows NT users or OS/2 or 3.1x/95 users, not sure.
Linux back then had poor USB support, as well.

Jo22 wrote on Yesterday, 18:02:

Hi, interestingly, basic input devices such as standard USB keyboard/mice are still using USB 1.x (12 mbit/s) because the data r […]
Show full quote

Hi, interestingly, basic input devices such as standard USB keyboard/mice are still using USB 1.x (12 mbit/s) because the data rate used by them is so low.
Special gaming keyboard/mice with displays etc are a different matter, though.
They may try to use USB 2.0 or higher, not sure.

About early USB scanners, I do remember that they often had an additional parallel port, as well.
Probably for Windows NT users or OS/2 or 3.1x/95 users, not sure.
Linux back then had poor USB support, as well.

I know. It's just standard USB HID devices which already worked with stock Win98FE. Only reason I even use a USB mouse with one of my win98 systems is because using a PS/2 one breaks my PS/2 keyboard. I kind of gave up trying to figure out why that happens.
As for LInux, that didn't get decent USB support until kernel 2.4 IIRC, though there was some basic stuff in 2.2.