USB serial driver for Teensy LC on Windows 98 SE?

S

Synthead

New member
I am working on a project with a Teensy LC that is a replacement for a serial device that is traditionally used with very old software. I could use RS232C serial with a MAX232 IC, but it would be really handy to use the USB serial of the Teensy LC natively in Windows 98 SE. However, finding a driver for this is tedious.

USB serial is super common, so I imagine that there's a working driver out there somewhere. Has anyone had any luck with this?
 
Windows 2000 is the oldest I ever got working.

In the early days of Teensy, around 2009-2010, I did make an attempt at Windows 98. But the INF details were vastly different. Microsoft had already deleted the official MSDN documentation. The 1990s were an era where MSDN documentation was usually provided on CDROM. Much of it seems to have been lost to time. I did make a significant effort (even though hardly anyone was still using 95/98/Me by 2010), but I wasn't able to piece together a working INF from the scraps of info and other pre-NT INFs I could find.
 
Hey Paul! Thank you so much for your reply!

Interesting to hear about your INF development! I was thinking that it wasn't as easy as it looks. Is there a chance that you still have a WIP INF file that we could attempt to pick at if we have the time?
 
No, sorry, there really wasn't anything useful from my Win 98 effort, so it wasn't saved.

Later in 2014 a *lot* of work went into the INF & CAT files, and work in the installer to refresh stale devnodes so the installer could recover from a variety of ways things can get messed up. Everything I still have today is from that 2014 work.

Even 12 years ago, there simply wasn't enough info available about the INF needed on Windows 98. Microsoft continuously redesigns their site and old info becomes 404 errors. Today even finding MSDN detailed info about Windows XP is nearly impossible.

Even on Windows 2000, and Vista before SP1 and XP before SP3, the drivers do not support IAD or composite devices with serial and anything else. Apple also didn't support composite with serial before Lion (10.7). Today we mostly use composite device descriptors, so just getting Teensy working on those older versions of Windows which can work requires going back to earlier versions of Teensyduino or editing the USB descriptors to not use composite or IAD.

Bottom line is there's zero hope of getting Teensy USB serial working on anything older than Windows 2000.
 
Oh interesting, I didn't know that composite devices was a consideration for older OSes. I totally see your point. That seems pretty difficult. Maybe a little RS232C would be ideal here. What's what the software expects anyway.

Thanks so much for the help! It's much appreciated.

In case you're curious, this is the little Arduino project I'm working on :) https://github.com/synthead/timex-datalink-arduino
The bread and butter lives in the Ruby library I'm working on that interacts with this adapter: https://github.com/synthead/timex_datalink_client
 
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