Windows 98 just got USB 3 and Thunderbolt drivers, 28 years late

Windows 98 went on sale on June 25, 1998, according to Wikipedia, and in 2026 it can read a Thunderbolt NVMe drive. Yeo Kheng Meng released a driver called xHCI98 that gives Windows 98 SE, ME, 2000, XP, Vista and 7 working USB 3, with experimental support for USB4 and Thunderbolt 3 and 4.

It started with a laptop. In his August post, Yeo writes that he set up Windows 98 SE on “my relatively modern 2020 ThinkPad P14s Gen 1,” where even USB 2.0 devices didn’t work because “those ports are controlled by xHCI.” Vendors wrote xHCI drivers for XP and 7 because those still had a market; “For Windows 98 there was never a commercial reason,” he writes. He built it “with heavy AI assistance,” and says that without AI it “would not have been feasible for me as a hobby project.” That first release only drove the USB 2.0 side of the controller. “After that, I decided to go further by giving this driver both USB 3.x and USB4/Thunderbolt support,” he writes in October.

The speeds are the fun part. The project’s GitHub page reports about 210 MB/s read and 256 MB/s write on Windows 98 SE, against 1,151 MB/s read and 1,013 MB/s write on Windows 7, and says Windows 98’s own storage stack is the bottleneck, not the Thunderbolt link. Plain USB 3 lands at “approximately 200+ MB/s” on Windows 98, Yeo writes, and flatlines from 64 KB transfers up because of the 64 KB request size limit in Windows’s USB storage driver.

If you’ve got a retro PC project, I’d read the warnings before the speed chart. Yeo writes that on real hardware the driver has run on two machines: Thunderbolt 3 on his ThinkPad P14s Gen 1 under Windows 98 SE and 7, and USB4 on a Framework Laptop 13 under Windows 10. He hasn’t tried Windows 98 through 7 on a real USB4 host, and the USB4 connection manager that AMD and ASMedia hosts need “has only been tested against the emulator.” The GitHub page tells XP users to keep a PS/2 or built-in keyboard handy, and warns that unplugging a drive Windows hasn’t stopped is a surprise removal, so cached writes can be lost. I’d try it on a machine you can afford to reinstall, with a copy of anything you care about somewhere else.

Windows 98 never had it this good.