Mirror with old USB drivers for MS-DOS

Screenshot of the original Darkehorse page

Okay, it's 2024 and the MS-DOS age seems like at least the previous century (which is accurate). But some hobbyists and enthousiasts still toy a bit with old operating systems. This old bloke tends to be one of them.

21 years ago someone with the alias "Darkehorse" had a page with all kinds of USB drivers. When he took it offline, I asked permission to mirror it, and permission was granted. This mirror was originally created at the 29th of April 2003 and from that moment on I continued this legacy.

Maybe you got here looking for that stuff, or maybe you just got curious about the page itself, but here you can find a screenshot of the original web page, and all data translated into neat a 2024-like HTML webpage.

Keep in mind, I do not provide support on these files!

USB Resources

As a general rule, USB is NOT supported in DOS. There are companies and individuals who are producing USB stacks for DOS, but nothing practical yet for the everyday DOS user. I hope to include all of the software and information available on this page since this topic does tend to pop up a lot on discussion boards.

Downloads

  • Iomega USB / Firewire Boot Diskette
    This boot diskette supposedly supports Firewire and USB Iomega ASPI devices. I have not tested this diskette so use at your own risk.
  • 'Motto Hairu' USB Driver
    This is a set of USB Drivers which includes USBASPI.SYS driver below. A lot of people have had success with these drivers. Here is a translation of the readme.txt file.
  • USB CD ROM Driver
    USBASPI.SYS; Another USB CD ROM Driver. A visitor told me about this and said he was able to use Ghost and this driver to backup his hard drive to a CD-RW. Add a device reference to this driver (device=usbaspi.sys) in your config.sys and then run MSCDEX or SHSUCDX in autoexec.bat to bind the driver.
  • USB DOS CD ROM Boot Disk
    (Recently updated this disk to include DUSE 4.4!) A Windows 98 Bootdisk I made using the DUSE.EXE driver below. I created this diskette for those folks having troubles getting DUSE to work with their USB CDROM drives. Download and double click this program to create the diskette (you will need to have a blank disk handy).
  • USB CD Rom Setup
    Modification for Windows 98 boot disks. Modifies a standard Windows 98 boot disk to use the usb_cd.sys driver below.
  • USB CD Rom Driver
    usb_cd.sys; driver included in the above package. Add device=usb_cd.sys to config.sys
  • USB Mouse Driver #1
    USB Mouse driver fror OHCI devices.
  • USB Mouse Driver #2
    USB Mouse driver for UHCI devices
  • USB4Pas.zip
    A USB library/routine for sniffing USB packets under Pascal / DOS.
  • Cypress USB Mass Storage Driver
    Version 4.4 of DUSE.EXE now supports USB 2.0!; WOW! What a great find. This 'universal' device driver will work with USB Zip Drives, Hard Drives, CD-ROM drives, floppy drives and something called MO drives. I was actually able to read the contents of my USB CD-RW disk with this driver. Read the instructions included with the package.