I have a GX100 (i810) and did some research into this. An SB Live with the EMS dos driver works well enough (for me), except where the game won't work with EMS. There may be some other issues as well, but EMS seems to be the biggest compatibility problem with them. I wanted to run a game that only worked in dos, and didn't work with EMS.

You will find people having some success with PCI sound cards in dos where the motherboard has an SBLink header and the sound card can use it, as this doesn't require an EMS based driver. But as far as I can tell, I haven't seen anyone been able to use SBLink in any way with an ICH based chipset like the i815. It's not that the header isn't there, its appears that the chipset doesn't support the header. It kind of makes sense. The i810 and successors were aimed at the budget business market.

Another interesting result is where people use an ESS Solo1 based card which doesn't use an EMS dos driver and doesn't use the SBLink header. I bought one of these but had no success getting the dos part of the driver working with the i810. And I eventually found some posts on vogons from other users complaining that the pure dos solution didn't work on their ICH based chipsets.

So the conclusion that I came to was that for these problematic old games I would be best using a motherboard with an ISA slot and an ISA sound card. Not the answer you wanted. Maybe the games you want to play are ok with EMS? In which case I like the SBLive. Do some research though as to whether these games specifically work with SBLive as there may be other issues. Also, there are OEM versions of SBLive out there that reportedly have a different chipset and either don't work well or are difficult to get working. The whole thing is a bit of a rabbit hole.

Spark wrote on Yesterday, 08:43:

I have a GX100 (i810) and did some research into this. An SB Live with the EMS dos driver works well enough (for me), except whe […]
Show full quote

I have a GX100 (i810) and did some research into this. An SB Live with the EMS dos driver works well enough (for me), except where the game won't work with EMS. There may be some other issues as well, but EMS seems to be the biggest compatibility problem with them. I wanted to run a game that only worked in dos, and didn't work with EMS.

You will find people having some success with PCI sound cards in dos where the motherboard has an SBLink header and the sound card can use it, as this doesn't require an EMS based driver. But as far as I can tell, I haven't seen anyone been able to use SBLink in any way with an ICH based chipset like the i815. It's not that the header isn't there, its appears that the chipset doesn't support the header. It kind of makes sense. The i810 and successors were aimed at the budget business market.

Another interesting result is where people use an ESS Solo1 based card which doesn't use an EMS dos driver and doesn't use the SBLink header. I bought one of these but had no success getting the dos part of the driver working with the i810. And I eventually found some posts on vogons from other users complaining that the pure dos solution didn't work on their ICH based chipsets.

So the conclusion that I came to was that for these problematic old games I would be best using a motherboard with an ISA slot and an ISA sound card. Not the answer you wanted. Maybe the games you want to play are ok with EMS? In which case I like the SBLive. Do some research though as to whether these games specifically work with SBLive as there may be other issues. Also, there are OEM versions of SBLive out there that reportedly have a different chipset and either don't work well or are difficult to get working. The whole thing is a bit of a rabbit hole.

Thanks! I'll look around on ebay (or maybe someone on the site wants to sell me a known working one?) I've been searching for a P3 board with ISA slots but I'm having no luck in local market, and everything shipped is astronomical in price!

Is your SB Live! a certain version? Like does it have a 32 or anything in the name?

I can understand the desire to get a PCI Audio card and would certainly keep exploring those options, but I did want to point out the existence of SBEMU (SBEMU: Sound Blaster emulation on AC97) . It would likely work with your GX150's i810's integrated audio. Maybe a stop gap solution?

My SB Live is a CT4620 iirc. It was in the PC when I acquired it.
But take advice from other vogons users - there are multiple topics on which soundblaster live pci versions to avoid.
The other thing is if you're running these games in Win 98 and not pure dos mode, you might get away with any half-decent PCI card with Win98 drivers. Like that ESS Solo1 card I was talking about which wouldn't work for me in pure dos on the i810, was working fine in 98.
Edit - check out this thread: PCI sound cards and Chipsets from various manufacturers...

BinaryDemon wrote on Yesterday, 10:38:

I can understand the desire to get a PCI Audio card and would certainly keep exploring those options, but I did want to point out the existence of SBEMU (SBEMU: Sound Blaster emulation on AC97) . It would likely work with your GX150's i810's integrated audio. Maybe a stop gap solution?

Yes! It does work, however as I mentioned in my post, the audio is high pitched/too fast so speech sounds very odd, and I can't find anyone on the internet that has my issue so I have no idea how to correct it. I tried a forked version of SBEmu and it had the opposite problem where everything was too slow/low pitched.

I also still need a solution for Windows 98 for my Quest for Fame game to not crash, so I was looking into a real SB or one of the Yamaha...

Spark wrote on Yesterday, 12:59:

My SB Live is a CT4620 iirc. It was in the PC when I acquired it. But take advice from other vogons users - there are multiple […]
Show full quote

My SB Live is a CT4620 iirc. It was in the PC when I acquired it.
But take advice from other vogons users - there are multiple topics on which soundblaster live pci versions to avoid.
The other thing is if you're running these games in Win 98 and not pure dos mode, you might get away with any half-decent PCI card with Win98 drivers. Like that ESS Solo1 card I was talking about which wouldn't work for me in pure dos on the i810, was working fine in 98.
Edit - check out this thread: PCI sound cards and Chipsets from various manufacturers...

Thank you! How can I determine if my board can support DDMA since it has no PC/PCI link?

Take a look at this thread which has some more info.

• Motherboard chipsets that support D-DMA

There's also this chart in Kemerat's signature:

• https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cvhr6 … dit?usp=sharing

It would be handy if there was some sort of test program to run to see if the MB supports any of these (DDMA, TDMA, WBDMA) but I didn't find anything like that yet.