Yeo Kheng Meng wrote an xHCI USB host driver for Windows 98 because none existed. His daily machine is a 2020 ThinkPad with only xHCI controllers, the standard required for USB 3.0, a spec that postdates Windows 98 by ten years. The driver is functional, self-admittedly possibly buggy, and lives on GitHub under the repo xhci98.
He used LLMs to assist in producing the driver code, a pragmatic call for a solo part-time project with no guarantee of an audience. The process is documented in detail on his blog, including embedded video of the driver running on both a 2020 ThinkPad and a 2016 model, neither of which has a legacy USB port. The methodology behind that human-AI workflow is the real story here, not just the output.
The driver also targets Windows ME and early XP, meaning the compatibility floor is broader than the project name suggests. Desktops can sidestep the problem entirely with a PCI USB 2.0 card. Meng has prior form on this: he previously ran MS-DOS on a modern ThinkPad X13 and Slack on Windows 3.11 on a ThinkPad T400. The blog post is worth reading in full for the debugging process alone.
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