I have a Compaq N600c with a Pentium 3 1.06 GHZ and a ESS allegro sound chip (Model 1988?). I cannot get any sound for dos games to work whatsoever through any driver under windows 98 or real mode dos. It will initialize correctly under realmode dos with proper dos drivers (ESSAUDIO.COM, ESSAUDIO.SYS, ESSAUDIO.INI). But as soon as run any game with the sound correctly set it instantly crashes-locksup. Even under windows 98 the doswindow will just lockup and I have to alt-tab or ctrl-alt-del to exit the game.

I've tried the newer WDM win98 drivers after an older driver set but still a no go. The older set gave me a device manager, dos emulation, and pci audio device under the device manager but either driver set was still a no go combined with or without the dos drivers loaded through autoexec.bat-config.sys

So now I'm wondering if there is any kind of ISA to pcmcia adapter or similar that I could use my SBAWE64 with on my laptop. My laptop also has a serial port, and an lpt1 printer port (I think it's lpt1) so maybe an adapter for those ports would work as well(if they exist...).

What about a sound blaster audigy 2 ZS? I've seen these as PCMCIA cards and thought these might be sound blaster dos compatible under windows 98. Maybe a usb sound blaster extigy or similar?

I also tried VDMSOUND for win9X (alpha 3 which I found in these forums somewhere) though I only got Destruction Derby to output sound and every other game seemed to either lockup or output noise so that was a no go...

I would try dosbox but there's no way in hell (even if it did freeze over) it would run acceptable on a pentium 3 @ 1.06ghz (not to mention there's always a mouse lag in dosbox on my quadcore 9450 @3.5ghz no matter what game it is. It feels much better on my native k6 dos system + my voodoo card for 3dfx games. No offense to the dosbox guys but I do think it's the best thing since mame). Virtual PC 2007 under windows XP pro wouldn't run Blood faster than a slide show on my laptop either. I haven't tried VMWARE yet but I would also like to hear other options that are plausible.