Hoi Bernd,

> has anyone any experience with properly working USB drivers?

Depends on what you mean with properly working ;-) As said in
my previous mail, I am already happy with booting from flash
USB sticks or using USB keyboards and mice using the BIOS but
that is limited (no hotplugging, often slow I/O) and many USB
devices exist which are not simply storage, keyboards or mice.

> I'm on a system with USB keyboard and booting from 2GB USB flash 
> disk/stick, formatted as FAT32. controller seems to be OHCI (Intel or 
> Nvidia controller).

> Unfortunately it seems quite hard to see what type a controller is, what 
> the supported speeds for the controller are, same for attached storage 
> devices, and which mode is being used currently between each disk and 
> controller.

You can use PCISLEEP L in DOS or lspci -nn in Linux to find out.

As for the storage, I only know lsusb (-v) in Linux, but some of
the DOS USB drivers or even some BIOSes might show a device list
at start-up or come with some tools for that.

> It appears my USB flash disk files are loading at USB1.1 low-speed
> transfer rates.

Not sure about the current state, but which USB versions does the
driver by Bret support? The driver by Georg can do USB 2 as far as
I remember, but the USB2-aware version is not free at the moment.
There is a time-limited demo version, though: You either have to
reboot or reload the driver once in a while with that, I believe.

> The issue I'm experiencing is that the USB keyboard is being reset
> on the few USB drivers that do manage to load succesfully.

The problem is that you cannot have a DOS USB driver and the BIOS
USB driver at the same time. One possibility is to tell the DOS
driver to ignore one of your controllers and leave that to what
the BIOS does, but then you need at least 2 controllers and you
have to know which of them is connected to which USB sockets ;-)

> Afterwards, I'm unable to use the keyboard. Bret's usbkeyb.com 
> program/driver seems to only interface with his own driver, which 
> doesn't load on my system as no UHCI controller found.

That is interesting. UHCI = USB 1.1, OHCI = almost the same but
a bit better (typically non-Intel/VIA controllers) but also 1995
standard, EHCI = USB 2.0 fast standard from 2000. Since 2010 the
USB 3.0 standard exists which is even faster. Note that normally
all EHCI controllers are extensions of UHCI or OHCI ones, a bit
like UDMA is an extension for IDE, so drivers and devices should
still be able to run at low speed with a new controller.

> Does any other USB keyboard driver work?

A bit of a small world answer, but have you tried "all three" yet?
I mean: The BIOS (see trick above) and the drivers by Bret and by
Georg? Not sure if Georg has int9 or int16 compatible support for
keyboards in his collection, though. I do remember that his system
is modular - a closed source core with a simple API for which you
could easily write a driver TSR to provide int9 or int16 keyboard
services to be loaded after the core. I think Bret generally tries
to simulate close to the hardware - when he supports USB keyboards
then he simulates 8042 keyboard / PS2 controller activities to let
your BIOS or classic DOS keyboard drivers interact with them then,
instead of directly doing higher level interfaces like int16 / CON.

All a bit of guesswork from my side but maybe still inspires you :-)

Groetjes, Eric


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