I had sound working in DOS with my Sb Live! recently, but I did the entire install of the windows drivers and DOS drivers using the CD rom that came with the soundcard when I originally got it.

I was trying to get a soundblaster live value card working with another machine a couple of months ago and I remember having to abandon the idea as I couldn't get sound working at all.

Sorry this post isn't much help. I eventually ended up putting two soundcards in the machine in question..the SB Live! for Windows games (untick the option to install the Dos drivers) and then a really cheap (4-5 euros) Yamaha ISA card for Dos (tell it not to install the windows drivers!)

Seems to work like a charm. Even if you do get the soundblaster live working in Dos, you won't be able to use it to power an external midi unit such as a Roland MT-32 or SC-55 which was the actual reason I went with two soundcards in the end.

Eeh, thanks anyway for that. I have been planning to- eventually- build a PC with a 386 or 486 for those old DOS games, as I already have ISA SB cards and Voodoo 1&2 cards hanging around, but lack a mobo and CPU (and other hardware).

The problem is that I don't have ISA slots on my current mobo, ASUS A7v266e, or I'd definitely go the way you did, installing an older card for DOS games. 😢 And unfortunately, I got the card used via eBay; thus, there was no driver disc included. Not sure if that was proper use of the semicolon but w/e.

You can get the discs from the VOGONS driver archive. In general, PCI Sound Cards have fairly decent support with later games. This is mostly because the games developers had access to better drivers that are more compatible with a wider range of cards.

Old games like Fate of Atlantis or Space Quest 1 VGA are "hard cases" for such cards and usually fail. One of the better PCI cards are Vortex 2 based cards, but they also fail with such games.

In short:

Windows: PCI Sound Card
DOS: ISA Sound Card

With your machine, stick with the newer games and it should work quite well. For the old Games I suggest using DOSBox on a modern PC or sourcing a machine with ISA slots. 386, 486 and Pentium machines all work wonderful. Pentium 2 and 3 with limitations, but all usually come with ISA slots.