Hey there,

as the topic says already I am using an ES1868 sound card, and I use the driver Phil got on his page here: https://www.philscomputerlab.com/ess-audiodrive-es1868.html
In addition I am using the DOS Starter pack he provides here: https://www.philscomputerlab.com/ms-dos-starter-pack.html
And when I am trying to set up the sound in Jagged Alliance I get errors.

Before I get into the details I just want to mention that I don't blame anything on Phil linking the software. I know it's not "his" and he is merely hosting them. I don't even know if its the software causing issues and I am grateful for the work he does for the retro community.
But mentioning this software right away hopefully already sets a bit of the scope the error can occur in as hopefully other people use a similar setup.

Alright, bit more about the issue itself:
The Sound in other games I checked works, like Lands of Lore (Music and Effects using the parameters I set for the soundcard, 220 5 1)
When I use the setting in Jagged Alliance, the Music works fine, but when I set the sound effects I get "ERROR -- Can't open sound driver. Hit a key to resume manual setup". Then I can set the data manually, but when I test the settings I get "Can't open sound driver ".\sbpro.dig" . I also tested sb16 but then I get ".\sb16.dig" accordingly.
When I then start the game I get "Digital sound hardware not found"

Troubleshooting steps I did:
-Patched the game to 1.13 (yes, thats also a patch for JA1)
-Started PC with conventional memory
-Tested 2 different original versions I got on CD and the GOLD Version from steam (which I can't run due to the iso, but I copied it over and get the same issue in the sound setup)
-Tested different installs (Large/Small)
-Tested Game on a different SDCard which got Win 98 SE (in windows mode). In this case the sound effects work! However the music doesn't work (it just doesnt play, but the game runs). I don't want to fix the Win 98 version though as I will scrap and redo that anyways. For DOS Games I would prefer to use the DOS SDCard. The difference beisdes of the OS is also that the SD only has one partition, while the DOS SD has 4 partitions.

So my assumptions are either that something is wrong with the driver, or that maybe this program expects the CD to be in a drive with a lower number (in DOS it's G, in Windows it's D)
I found a few reports of similar symptoms, but weirdly enough they originate from DOSBOX users doing stuff with the ISO or from installations on Android with write permission issues.
I could not see how their problem solutions could be applied in my case though.
When I googled for solutions I also saw Daggerfall popping up a few times. Not sure if it uses a similar system with similar issues.

Would appreciate any help.