Thunderbolt Strikes Windows98 | Hackaday

If there’s one factor everybody hated about Windows 98, was the shortage of USB4.0 assist. We bear in mind vividly the cries of anguish on the launch get together once we discovered that 21 years sooner or later, the working system wouldn’t assist the then-undreamt of speeds of the thunderbolt-based quickest USB protocol. After 20 years of residing with this crushing disappointment, [Yeo Kheng Meng] has delivered the products: probably the most fashionable of USB interfaces on some very much not modern versions of windows.

This builds on [Yeo Kheng Meng]’s work on xHCI drivers for USB2.0 assist, which we covered at the time. Like that hack, this one applies to Windows 98 by 7, and has an identical stage of LLM-wrangling concerned. There are literally a couple of elements to it– one is a USB3.0 driver, which replaces the outdated xHCI98 driver and is available on GitHub. On Windows98, USB3.0 velocity caps out round 200 MB/s, seemingly restricted by Windows98’s most request restrict of 64kB on USB transfers. Even with the quicker bus in motion, it may well solely gobble these tiny blocks of knowledge so quick.

There’s additionally experimental USB4.0/Thunderbolt assist, as said above. While not as steady because the USB3.0 portion, we’re form of impressed it runs in any respect. Thunderbolt is greater than only a quicker knowledge bus, in spite of everything– it’s important to assist a number of protocols. To deal with all that you may set up xhcicm.sys and have the surreal expertise of accessing an docked NVMe drive from the final century’s greatest Windows by way of his Stor98 driver. That’s primarily based largely on [SweetLow]’s NVMe9x challenge, which he forked however goes to be bundled into the principle repo.

What is likely to be extra useful to the neighborhood than these drivers is [Yeo Kheng Meng]’s fork of QEMU11 that emulates USB4/Thunderbolt hosts and gadgets. Having a working emulator looks like it will be an enormous boon for this type of semi-automated growth. That’s accessible in its personal repo.

Aside from the already-linked USB2.0 drivers, [Yao Kheng Meng] has a powerful retro-computing file, that features Swift on the Apple II and turning DOS into llama.c habitat. It needs to be famous that that llama.c’s TinyStories is not the LLM that assisted with this challenge.

Thanks to [Yeo Kheng Meng] for the tip!