Hi there,
I´m new here so here´s some short info about myself:
My name is Patrick, i´m 21 years old, based in germany and i´m interested in old and new computer hardware, android phones and development aswell as electronics and professional RC model cars /-airplanes.

Going back to my issue:
I bought an old Compaq Armada M700 to upgrade from a Armada 7770DMT which is rather slow even with it´s Pentium MMX 233Mhz it isn´t capable running "EarthWorm Jim 2" at full speed.
The new laptop comes with a Pentium III 500Mhz and the game runs at full speed but the issue starts here:

After setting up Windows 98SE, i started to download and test various different drivers just after finding it ´s hardware ID´s in Windows Xp since there was no support page for this model online.
It turned out to be a ESS 1978 Maestro 2E and i found various drivers for it.
After installing one, first i was quite happy as everything seemed to work just fine and even the game "Jill of the Jungle" detected the sound blaster compatibility and played audio just fine.
Mp3´s and audio CDs also played fine.
And then the most important thing came:
Running Earthworm Jim 1 and 2.
They´re DOS/Windows games and come with a setup utility for windows but then run in a command prompt in fullscreen.
Strange things happened then:
After launching the game, the CD gets ejected and the game asks for the CD, after closing the bay again the game launched BUT there is no ingame music only sound effects.
The CD has audio tracks that should play but nothing happens.
Also strange why the CD gets ejected when launching and closing the game...

Later it turned out it ´s somehow caused by the audio driver I used.
After installing Windows Me instead of 98SE it used WDM drivers for the soundcard which launched the game fine with music but no sound effects due to the missing "DOS/FM" driver module.
On my older Compaq it uses an older ESS card but also uses WDM drivers provided by microsoft AND still got a "Sound Blaster compatible (WDM) driver module and in fact play fine both ingame cd audio and effects but the performance of the laptop is poor.

Later i found another strange behavior:
When installing the drivers from windows 98 on ME and manually selecting them from device manager after the setup completed and rebooted (there was still the wdm driver in use), the sound blaster compatibility showed up again, didn´t ask for a reboot and the game launched just fine both with cd audio and sound effects.
AFTER a reboot though, the same strange and annoying issue happens again:
Launch game > eject CD > reinsert > finally launch the game > game plays with sound but no cd audio is played.

I tried many many different drivers in Windows 98SE and also tried the same with Windows Me but nothing was working for me.
So i´m unsure if there´s any fixed driver out there without this issue or if it might even actually be an issue with the game itself, i really don´t know.
I only know it plays the game´s audio tracks fine in Windows Media Player.

I really don´t know what else i can do to finally play those two games except going for the gog.com version played in dosbox... i want it to play on real hardware and with the correct aspect ratio of the screen.

If anyone has an idea, i´d love to hear!
Thank you so much!