Yeo Kheng Meng wanted Windows 98 on a 2020 ThinkPad. The laptop exposes only an xHCI USB controller, the type needed for USB 3.0. Windows 98 predates that hardware by about a decade, and no suitable driver was available. Meng developed one with guidance from LLMs. The project is intended for Windows 98 and later versions.
Source code is available on GitHub under xhci98. The driver works, although Meng warns that it can be buggy. He plans to address defects reported in the repository. A blog post explains the development and contains videos of the driver running on the 2020 ThinkPad and on another model from 2016. The newer machine should also support Windows 11. Neither laptop has older USB ports.
Older laptops may still offer those ports. A desktop can use a PCI card with a USB2.0 controller. Before this project, Meng connected such a card through adapters. The same retrocomputing streak appears in his earlier work with stock MS-DOS on a modern ThinkPad X13 and Slack on Windows 3.11 For Workgroups on a ThinkPad T400.
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