Windows 9x is for all intents and purposes a GUI on top of MS-DOS 7.x, if you have an ISA sound card with sound blaster compatibility in the system and the corresponding drivers for Windows 9x installed, it will behave pretty much identical to how it would in true MS-DOS.

Windows drivers and DOS drivers are very different and often expose different audio capabilities, even for the same card, or have features working better or worse. Think of General MIDI capabilities that work flawlessly out of the box on Creative AWE or Crystal CS46xx cards for DOS games running in Windows, but not in DOS.

If the Windows drivers provide an SB emulation layer, then DOS games will be able to detect a Sound Blaster. It has nothing to do with whether the DOS driver for that card provides such a layer, or whether there exists a DOS driver at all.

So generally, getting DOS games to play sound under Win9x may be easier than in pure DOS; there may be other issues running the game in Windows, though.

So the original reason for this question was when I tried to run Master or Orion, a fairly old DOS game.I have a CD version of it that has a Win9x front-end but it's basically just running an old DOS game. It runs ok but there's no sound, and while there is a sound config option it just calls the DOS setup.exe and wants to know Port/IRQ/DMA. Right now I'm using motherboard audio and I don't think there's any DOS compatibility provided by it, so I suspect that I will need to install my old AudioPCI card instead if I want sound from DOS games.