Archived from groups: microsoft.public.win95.general.discussion (
More info?)
On Fri, 24 Dec 2004 02:20:54 -0400, "Juan B. Rivera"
>Although Windows 95B does support USB, the industry does not recognize it
>and requires you to upgrade to Win 98 or a more recent OS. USB peripherals
>just do not work, regardless of enabling and installing drivers. I wish for
>a utility that deceives those peripherals so they "see" Win 98 instead of 95.
It won't be as simple as that. USB has had a long and painful
gestation, a bit like the earliest days of PCI (then again, PCI went
on to an excellent decade-long career).
For the first year or few, we called it "Useless Serial Bus", because
while we insisted on new systems supporting it as a "checkbox item",
there were few if any USB devices.
Then came USB scanners, and then printers swung over, and by now it's
just about everything. It's become the biggest issue compelling
Win95xx users to move up at least as far as Win98xx.
OS support for USB started with Win95 SR2.x, but it was buggy and was
redone in Win98. It still had its rough edges there, and was smoothed
a bit in Win98SE, which also offered an alternate driver model that
potentially shared commonality with NT.
The new driver model was an attempt to get hardware vendors to support
NT as well as Win9x, but now it's ironically the other way round;
Win98SE is often catered only for via this model, and where so, the
bar is raised to Win98SE for entry.
MS dropped support for Win95 a while ago, and that applies to driver
developers too - that's why most stuff requires either Win98 or
Win98SE as the oldest supported versions.
But if the OS's USB code materially changed between Win95 SR2 and
Win98, simply spoofing the drivers to think Win95 SR2 is Win98 is
unlikely to work. More likely you'd have a crash instead of refusal.
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Proverbs Unscrolled #37
"Build it and they will come and break it"
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