The answer is yes to all your questions. I had a similar setup (SB16 + SBLive) for quite some time.

Windows lives well with 2 sound cards. You can choose which one is used by applications. You can even disable the other one in the device manager, although in principle there is no need to do so (unless Windows complains about resource conflicts).

You can use the same speaker set for both cards, by routing the Line Out of one of them to the Line In of the other one. For a while I had it set up as follows:

4.1 speakers.

SB Live rear out --> Speakers rear in
SB Live front out --> SB16 line in
SB 16 line out --> Speakers front in

In DOS only the SB16 was active, and only the front speakers worked (stereo). In Windows, both cards were active, and SBLive was the default one, and all 4 speakers worked (where 4-channel was supported).

Yes, I've done this on a number of computers oeuvre the years. I've used one of these and it works great. That way you can connect both sound cards to one headset/speaker system.

http://www.amazon.com/Belkin-RockStar-3-5-mm- … r/dp/B0017PG8KS

I think I got it working. Thanks for the help and suggestions.

Seems that bass seems to have dissapeared though with this method. Also not getting any soundblaster pcm in dos games using the dos window in win98se. Any ideas?

Using a AWE64 in DOS and a Live! in Windows in one of my rigs, connected from their line out jacks to the same speaker set, through the simplest possible passive mixer. Very convenient, no routing through the other card, and no switches whatsoever.

Used 2k2 ohm resistors, which might be higher than recommended by some. Had to crank up the volume a little bit more than before, but my untrained ears can't hear any distortion, and better safe than sorry when you don't have the energy to calculate accurate values, and just want to throw something together to get things up and running as quick as possible 😀

You can follow this schematic, with resistance values adapted to your needs. Remember to connect the ground channel too, no resistors needed there.

I had this exact setup in my KT7-RAID rig, but have swapped out the SBlive for a Yamaha 724 based sound card.

The best way for this to work is with a non-pnp sb16, as in my case Win98 doesn't pick up the sb16 at all unless I make it
go and search for non-pnp cards. With either card it works perfectly.