# Developer brings USB4/Thunderbolt drivers to Windows 98 through 7

> **Key takeaway:** Yeo Kheng Meng released open-source USB3.0 and experimental USB4/Thunderbolt drivers for Windows 98 through Windows 7, along with a QEMU fork that emulates USB4/Thunderbolt hardware for retro-computing development.

**Published:** 2026-10-19T05:00:51+00:00 
**Source:** Hackaday Hardware 
**Category:** open-hardware 
**Canonical URL:** https://fosswire.org/news/developer-brings-usb4thunderbolt-drivers-to-windows-98-throu.html 

## Summary
Yeo Kheng Meng has published open-source drivers that bring USB3.0 and experimental USB4/Thunderbolt support to Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, and 7. The USB3.0 driver replaces his earlier xHCI98 driver and is available on GitHub. On Windows 98, USB3.0 speeds are capped around 200 MB/s due to the OS's 64kB maximum USB transfer request limit. The experimental Thunderbolt support can access docked NVMe drives via the Stor98 driver, which is based on SweetLow's NVMe9x project. Meng also released a fork of QEMU 11 that emulates USB4/Thunderbolt hosts and devices to aid development.

## What the drivers do and their limits
- **USB3.0 driver**: Replaces xHCI98, available on GitHub; works across Windows 98 through 7
- **Speed ceiling on Windows 98**: ~200 MB/s, bottlenecked by the OS's 64kB maximum USB transfer request size
- **USB4/Thunderbolt**: Experimental status, less stable than USB3.0; requires handling multiple protocols beyond raw data speed
- **NVMe access**: Via xhcicm.sys and Stor98 driver, enabling docked NVMe drive access on vintage Windows
- **Stor98 origins**: Based on SweetLow's NVMe9x project; fork will be merged into the main repository
- **QEMU 11 fork**: Emulates USB4/Thunderbolt hosts and devices for semi-automated driver development

## Why it matters
The QEMU fork may be more valuable to the retro-computing community than the drivers themselves, as it provides an emulated development environment that lowers the barrier for testing and improving legacy Windows hardware support.