Audigy 2 ZS works great in 98. As you said its a nice card and supports all the EAX versions that a Win9x game would need. You can get the hacked Audigy 1 drivers if you need dos legacy support, this is a pain to get running though.
Think the Audigy 4 was the last card to support WIn9x but they are harder to come by and to my mind don't offer much more then the ZS.

Turtle beach Santa Cruz is a nice card for 98.

Most Aureal Vortex cards are great for Windows 98, I think Vortex 2 SQ2500 is definitely not worse than SB Live! 5.1

The Live! cards to have for 98 and DOS are the original releases like CT4670 and CT4620. These work with Liveware.

If you don't care much for EAX, then Aureal is great. Unbeknownst to most people though, the Aureal drivers are quite unstable and buggy. They can crash Windows with some games that use A3D. EAX support is essentially worthless. Best driver is 2041.

Other cards may or may not be reliable for EAX support. That includes QSound and Sensaura based cards like the Santa Cruz.

Audigy 1 is nice indeed. Audigy 2 has some annoyances such as installing WDM drivers on 98SE by default which causes problems with game audio quality and performance. You will again have the retail vs. OEM card driver snag. It's not much of a problem for XP or newer anymore because of the Daniel K drivers, but for 98 you need to use the original driver CD to get the drivers AFAIK.

I would just use the kX Project drivers as the quality and volume are better (better DAC on rear output, swappable as main output, great if you're interested in kernel streaming) but I am only interested in solid stereo output. I used them for games, but I never used EAX or midis.

Edit: Although, it's mostly relevant to WinXP installs, disabling any ACPI helps Live! cards be much more friendly, and it has always improved the performance of my system. (most notably, my framerate in games would increase a few frames, sometimes as much as 9 or 10 fps.) I have always liked the Live! cards despite their low-brow reputation as you just need to know how to work with them... and they are dirt-cheap to free, these days, often with the expansion-card and or Live! Drive.

kx drivers are no doubt the go-to choice when you aren't going to game on the Live!. But the lack of EAX and questionable DS3D support kill it for gaming. That and I think the main quandary here is Windows 98 support which kx doesn't do at all.

Another vote here for an Aureal Vortex based card, preferably the Vortex2. I have a Turtle Beach Montego, a Turtle Beach Quadzilla, and most recently a Diamond Monster Sound MX300. The 3D positional audio is miles ahead of anything Creative was doing during that time, which was why they sued Aureal into oblivion and basically stole the technology.

You really want to have a Live or Audigy in addition to a Vortex 2. EAX was used to good effect in some games and Vortex isn't useful for EAX. And of course A3D is unique and cool too, when it works right.

Hmmm, you guys have got me interested in Vortex 2 boards now. I think I had a Turtle Beach Quadzilla back in the day, but it's long gone.

sliderider wrote:

I have a Turtle Beach Montego, a Turtle Beach Quadzilla, and most recently a Diamond Monster Sound MX300.

Does any of these cards have a clear advantage over the others? Also, would you agree with swaaye's recommendation of the 2041 drivers?

swaaye wrote:

The Live! cards to have for 98 and DOS are the original releases like CT4670 and CT4620. These work with Liveware.

I guessed I skipped over the original Live! cards, thinking (perhaps foolishly) that the later Live! 5.1 cards would be better. Any particular reason why the originals are better for DOS and Windows 98? Also, what's the story with Liveware? I've seen it mentioned in various places, but haven't found any official source. I've never understood why Creative can't be bothered to support their own products...

interestingly I recently tried the Hercules Game Theater XP in my Win98 machine, just to see if there are any improvements over my SBLive CT4760 card (the gamer edition 5.1) , it gave me a bunch of issues , at first there was no sound at all , eventually I got the sound to work , but then every game would take 10+ minutes to load, seems like the driver

I did like the sound quality and I even noticed that games gained a frame or 2 in alot of games, but the EAX was not very good, and sounded very quiet, the external box the card came with was very nice though

SBLive has its issues though at least it works as it should in my case, I would use my Audigy2 ZS if it wasn't a pain to get to work on Win98 , and I haven't yet been able to find any Aureal based cards.

maximus wrote:

Does any of these cards have a clear advantage over the others? Also, would you agree with swaaye's recommendation of the 2041 drivers?

I guessed I skipped over the original Live! cards, thinking (perhaps foolishly) that the later Live! 5.1 cards would be better. Any particular reason why the originals are better for DOS and Windows 98? Also, what's the story with Liveware? I've seen it mentioned in various places, but haven't found any official source. I've never understood why Creative can't be bothered to support their own products...

Liveware is a brand Creative used for Live drivers around 1998-2000. Liveware 3 is perhaps the ideal Live driver for 98.

Bit of history:
http://books.google.com/books?id=tKO-truWww8C … 3%20eax&f=false

Here is a CD image of Liveware 3. This works only with the Live and Live Value pre 5.1.
http://www.mediafire.com/download/n13owcw4c3c … O_Win9x.zip.001
http://www.mediafire.com/download/w42aso6k597 … O_Win9x.zip.002

Have you tried the drivers from this link with your 5.1?
http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/115903-compil … for-windows-9x/

Aureal Vortex 2 driver 2041 being the best choice is a finding of mine from playing lots of games. There have been a few threads about it and I think other people agreed. Later drivers have odd bugs like partially reversed stereo in some games. 2048 is the only version with EAX emulation but it is just awful so no loss.

maximus wrote:

Hmmm, you guys have got me interested in Vortex 2 boards now. I think I had a Turtle Beach Quadzilla back in the day, but it's l […]
Show full quote

Hmmm, you guys have got me interested in Vortex 2 boards now. I think I had a Turtle Beach Quadzilla back in the day, but it's long gone.

sliderider wrote:

I have a Turtle Beach Montego, a Turtle Beach Quadzilla, and most recently a Diamond Monster Sound MX300.

Does any of these cards have a clear advantage over the others? Also, would you agree with swaaye's recommendation of the 2041 drivers?

swaaye wrote:

The Live! cards to have for 98 and DOS are the original releases like CT4670 and CT4620. These work with Liveware.

I guessed I skipped over the original Live! cards, thinking (perhaps foolishly) that the later Live! 5.1 cards would be better. Any particular reason why the originals are better for DOS and Windows 98? Also, what's the story with Liveware? I've seen it mentioned in various places, but haven't found any official source. I've never understood why Creative can't be bothered to support their own products...

I haven't done any driver testing. I usually use whatever driver comes with it unless I see someone recommending a different version.

Been using Live! Platinum 5.1 for few years now in my PII Win95c based system. All's well, and no driver issues either.

swaaye wrote:

Have you tried the drivers from this link with your 5.1?
http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/115903-compil … for-windows-9x/

No, but I'll be sure to give them a try next time I'm configuring a Windows 98 machine. Thanks for the link.

A brief update on this story:

It turns out the first SB0060 I bought wasn't defective after all. I popped it in my machine just now, and it works perfectly. I guess there was there was something wrong with the drivers when I tested it before.

Note to self: always, always, ALWAYS reinstall Windows 98 before changing ANY hardware. I should have known better 🤣