The sound issues I had with AITD usually had to do with the CPU being too fast. Not sure if that’s your case…

The music & sfx work when run through Windows 98se, but I only get music when run in MS-DOS Mode.

To clarify, when I load Install.exe, my sound card isn't able to be used.

Ok, some more info is needed:
1- What is your sound card? Does the sound work for other games in pure DOS?
2- What are your system specs?
3- Is it the floppy or CD version of the game?

Sound Card is an OPL3-based card.
System is a Toshiba Satellite Pro 335CDT w/ 266 Mhz CPU.
Other games do work when in MS-DOS Mode.
NA CD Version.

Here is what I would try to troubleshoot it:
-Disable L1 and L2 caches in BIOS
-After disabling caches, run DOS straight after boot instead of clicking start/shut down/ exit to DOS. This can be done by pressing F8 when the “Starting Windows 98” message appears and then selecting the “Command Prompt” option
-Try to execute the install program from there and see if the sound card is detected now
-If it works, then issue is due to CPU being too fast. If it doesn’t, the issue is something else .

In troubleshooting beforehand, I tried disabling the CPU Cache as well as starting in pure DOS, the issue remains however.

My other guess would be the memory configuration, how does your config.sys and autoexec.bat files look like?
Have you tried different combinations like enabling/disabling EMM386? How much free conventional memory do you have when running the game?

When going into the Hardware Options portion of the Install program, Sound Blaster/16 isn't an option.

B. Blaze wrote on 2024-02-15, 02:07:

When going into the Hardware Options portion of the Install program, Sound Blaster/16 isn't an option.

That happened to me, too. Question is trying to remember what fixed it as it happened years ago 😀
If its not CPU speed, then it could be memory, if you type MEM in DOS, how much conventional memory it says you have? The manual says that AITD 3 requires around 600k and AITD2 around 580k.

I can get both music & sfx in AITD3, but AITD2 is still being finicky. 🤔

This thread can be marked as solved. As is the case with most things DOS related, my issue came down to user error. It ended up being a slight conflict with the Sound Card settings. For anyone reading this in the future, be sure that there aren't any conflicts between your hardware & software. 👍👍