Today, I found out that my friend's father has a gigantic stash of old PC hardware which neither me or my friend knew about til now since his father didn't think it was worth mentioning. For him it's just a pile of useless stuff that may just be worth some money if somebody wanted to buy it for re-melting. I gazed with awe at the 1x2x1 meter box filled up the edges with retro gold with another full crate on top of it.

I dug through some of it and after getting a new motherboard for my Pentium 3 build, I also found some interesting sound cards. I took the four best looking ones of them. They all have the CMI8738 SX chip and they are all rather tiny. I looked it up online and this is what it says on the official C-media website:

With high speed PCI V2.1 bus controller and legacy audio SBPro® DSPemulator,CMI8738 is designed for PC add-in cards and all-in-one motherboards. No external CODEC is needed in CMI8738: CMI-8738 supports the legacy audio – SBPRO™, FM emulator/DLS wavetable music synthesis, and HRTF 3D positional audio functions. Drivers support EAX®, Karaoke Key, Echo……functions.

CMI8738 uses HRTF 3D extension technology to enhance traditional HRTF 3D positional audio by substituting two-speaker system by four or six - speaker one.

Being outstanding for its full audio functions, competitive price, and power management, CMI-8738 is the best choice for people seeking for optimum use of the PC applications.

As you can see, supposedly the cards have support for SBPRO and all the toys you would need for DOS games.

However, when I put one in, installed the drivers and run Wolfenstein 3D to test it's legacy support, the game didn't detect anything and there was no sound.

So, I'm probably doing something wrong. How do I get it to put the alleged legacy SBPRO support to work with DOS games in the Windows 98 environment? (or in pure DOS, if there's no other way)