Can you get the sound card to work in DOS?

Hmm, sounds like the issues I had with IRQ's when I had both the GUS and SB16 setup in Windows - for some reason Windows would re-assign different IRQ's to that which were set in DOS (and allow both cards to work successfully), and the SB16 would give either a looping sound when the wave device was accessed, or muffled static. I didn't get a 'device in use' error though.
I eventually figured I was asking Windows to do too much resource management and disabled the GUS in windows (there was nothing much in Windows that took real advantage of it anyway)... that seemed to give enough leeway for Windows to correctly manage the available system resources and the problem went away.

make sure the DMA channels aren't conflicting also

Woohoo, got sound working at last! But no music yet.

TheMAN, looks like you were right - I changed likely-looking bios settings [reboot, try games, etc] but what finally seemed to fix it was reserving dma 5 that I had not initially realised the card was using. Windows 98 had reported no conflicts of course. So now have sound in dos and 98. No music in either though so I'm guessing something is muted somehow; wave slider in volume panel is not the cause though. Seem to recall some utility to fix this, so I'm going to have a look at malik's driver collection upload.

Thanks for the help.

What do you mean with 'no music'? No midi? If so, check the multimedia settings and set the correct midi device (MPU if you have midi DB or similar, or synth otherwise).

I meant no FM synthesis, which I'm assuming is what for example heretic tries to play when you select sound blaster as the music card. Under DOS or windows.

I don't get any midi either, but that doesn't matter to me right now. For MIDI, the windows multimedia setting is pointing to the Creative Wave Synth [220], but the MIDI slider in the volume control panel is greyed out.

Running SB16mix.exe utility does not seem to make any difference to getting FM synth music.