Hi everyone, long time lurker and first lengthy post; I'm experiencing an issue with my current setup which consists of a Compaq Armada 7730MT and an Armada Station II. I'm hoping I can get some leads on how to resolve my sound issue with DOS games.

Background:
When I got ahold of my 7730MT a year ago, I installed Windows 98SE along with the necessary drivers (for instance ESS Audio), and MS DOS 7.10 (since a few of my friends recommended it). The whole setup was able to play DOS games flawlessly; FM-sound worked very well for games like Monkey Island, Sam and Max, Treasure Math Storm, Day of the Tentacle and even my favorite music trackers such as Adlib Tracker II.

Although the current setup was great and all, I personally wanted to take a step further and get ahold of an Armada Station given that those docking stations tend to have two ISA slots and an ethernet cord (which made backing up my song files and games easier). One day I managed to pick up an Armada Station II which I had initially thought would work with the 7700 series but doing a bit of researching it turned out it was meant for only the 7400 and 7800 series. After spending a few days trying to find the appropriate drivers on the HP site and trying to make the docking station work, my 7730MT was able to detect it on my Device Manager. Soon after I temporarily disabled my ESS Audio drivers on the Device Manager, inserted my Sound Blaster CT1740, grabbed one of the Sound Blaster Installation disks from the Vogon archive, New Hardware Wizard already had a profile for such cards and managed to install the CT1740 and I ran the Diagnosis.exe. From there I followed the prompts, did a reset and everything appeared (and sounded) fully operational... at least I believed that was the case.

The Problem:
One night I decided to load up Monkey Island II and I noticed my audio was gone; soon after I loaded up Day of the Tentacle and the game was hanging at the introduction (with a hang note playing). I decided to try another game such as Monkey Island I and Treasure Math Storm; both games would play unpleasant garbled FM sounds or freeze past a certain point.

I decided to check out my autoexec.bat via. DOS 7.10 and saw the following line:
SETBLASTER=A220 I9 D0 H5 P330 T6 [w/ CT1740]
If I remember correctly, my previous SETBLASTER line looked like this:
SETBLASTER=A220 I7 D1 H5 P330 T6 [w/ ESS Audio]
I loaded up Windows and played around with the Diagnosis and was able to change my settings to:
SETBLASTER=A220 5 D3 H6 P330 T6 [w/ CT1740]

Although the Diagnosis program said it'll save the line for me to the respective system files, when I load up the autoexec.bat again it appeared that the line reverted back to the I9 D0 H5. I decided to manually change it to what the Diagnosis suggested, and even though I save it, it'll revert back to the same line. I decided to look further into the resources and interrupts and it keeps putting my card to IRQ 9 (which that doesn't seem to exist in the Diagnosis to begin with) along with DMA 0 and 5, with 5 causing a conflict with my "Motherboard Resource". I even right clicked my Sound Blaster in the Device Manager and made the attempt to change the hardware profile to something else but it appears that the only IRQ is 9 for some unknown reason.

Wrapping it all up:
What's interesting with all this is that, digital audio (such as Wav, MP3, etc.) play like normal, and Adlib Tracker II operates flawlessly with the CT1740 (and sounds like an absolute dream with my songs). I have a couple ideas as to what may be the problem...

1.) I'm under the impression that something happened with my system file or Windows file that keeps causing it to revert back to that line or pushing the IRQ to 9.
2.) I'm guessing DOS games don't play well with high IRQs, or odd SETBLASTER lines, at least from what I've read in the past; correct me if I'm wrong on that.
3.) Should I consider uninstalling/removing my ESS Audio to its entirety since I don't plan on using these anymore?

Nonetheless I would appreciate any leads/solutions to this situation; thank you for reading. 😀