Most of us take the USB ports on our computers for granted. We plug in devices and expect them to work automatically with the operating system. However, what if this wasn’t the case with vintage operating systems?
I present to you xHCI98, a driver that gives Windows 98 SE, ME, 2000 and XP working USB on machines whose only USB controller is xHCI.
Windows 98 Device Manager showing xHCI Controller initialised and ready to accept USB devices on an operating system that previously could not support it.
Everything is open-sourced here if you want to jump right in to use it: https://github.com/yeokm1/xhci98. All text below have been written and phrased by me and not AI. Only the diagrams and tables are AI created.
Demo video here showing me hotplugging many different types of USB devices to my 2020 ThinkPad P14s Gen 1. Hotplugging shows that the driver is handling this and not the BIOS.
ATTO Disk Benchmark on a USB 3.0 flash drive tops up around 18 MB/s. That is within USB 2.0 High-Speed which is all this driver supports and I’ll explain why below.