First of all, specs:

ASUS A7V8X-X mobo with onboard sound
Athlon XP 2000+ CPU running at 1666 MHz (default)
512 MB PC3200 RAM
GeCube Radeon 9600 XT 128 MB
Windows 2000

Game:

M.A.X. (Mechanized Assault and Exploration)

The problem:

The game fails to start up if I have any kind of sound device selected (error message "Screen Init failed"). I'm running Setup.exe through VDMSound, and can perform a more or less successful sound test if I select Sound Blaster, Sound Blaster Pro or Sound Blaster 16/AWE32 with the appropriate port, IRQ and DMA numbers. By more or less successful I mean that at some settings the sound is played sluggish. There's no sensible difference between right and left channel in the sound test, although they're different from center channel.

However, when I start the game using Maxrun.exe, I get the "Screen Init failed" message, regardless if I run it through VDMS or standalone. If I select no sound device in the setup, the game starts up fine, even if I don't use VDMS to launch Setup.exe (which otherwise freezes the sound test).

I have rebooted after installing VDMSound.

Steps taken:

I have tried almost every possible combination regarding sound devices, to no avail. I installed Abandonware Loader, but it fails to start the game even without sound.