Prince of Persia 2 can indeed be finicky and suffers from sound-related freezes.

Which version do you have? You can determined based on the main executable size IR (290,415 bytes), 1.0 (292,865 bytes) or 1.1 (259,583 bytes)?

Does the CM 8738 emulate an SBPro? Prince of Persia 2 has a setup program (SETUP.EXE), where you should be able to choose between SB and SBPro and also set the IRQ. It should work with IRQ5 as well.

dr_st wrote on 2020-11-30, 16:25:

Prince of Persia 2 can indeed be finicky and suffers from sound-related freezes.

Which version do you have? You can determined based on the main executable size IR (290,415 bytes), 1.0 (292,865 bytes) or 1.1 (259,583 bytes)?

Does the CM 8738 emulate an SBPro? Prince of Persia 2 has a setup program (SETUP.EXE), where you should be able to choose between SB and SBPro and also set the IRQ. It should work with IRQ5 as well.

Hello dr_st. I tried using V 1 as well as 1.1 with the sane results. I believe Cm8738 emulates a sb pro. The V 1.1 allowed to only select sb pro whereas V 1.0 presented more options incl sb as well. However both gave freezes. Will try changing the IRQ in the setup and let you know. Thanks.

I tried changing the IRQ to 5 as well as to auto detect for versions 1 and 1.1 but in vain. Getting the same freezing issue.

It may be there is some incompatibility between PoP2 and the CMI8738. PoP2 is finicky, as I observed. I had some weird problems with it (although different than yours) when I was using an AWE64, and when I switched to an Audician 32, they went away:
Messing with K6XV3+/66 retro system again... AWE64 lockups in Prince of Persia 2 / Prehistorik 2

I remember having this same issue back in the day. Fixed it in the end but I don’t remember exactly how (sorry, didn’t know much about computers at the time so no idea what my sound card was).
Issue was on the IRQ the game was using for sound (in my case, it needed to be 5 instead of the default 7). I also had to run the game on actual DOS.
I see you already tried changing the IRQ on device manager and the game itself, so my suggestions are:
-Maybe your CPU is too fast? This may cause sound related issues as well... can you try disabling caches or using any slow down program?
-Try removing/commenting the lines mentioned by you in Autoexec.bat. It seems to me that SETAUDIO is only relevant if you want to run the games under pure dos. Maybe they are causing some incompatibility.
-If nothing else works, try running the game on actual DOS (starting in DOS mode or by pressing F8 while Windows is about to start and selecting Command Prompt), in this case you will need SETAUDIO enabled.

Update:
Just tried it on my win98 machine (Athlon 750mhz, 256megs of RAM), if I leave the IRQ to 7 in the game's SETUP the sound will work only until I kill the first guard, then the game will only have music (I believe this is the moment the game freezes for you, for me the sound just stopped working, maybe because of my ISA sound card). Setting the IRQ to 5 under SETUP fixed the problem.
Btw, this was done under Windows 98 dos box and not real DOS, another funny thing is that my sound card is an AWE64 (game is V1.0) 😀

Hope it helps...

Hello gaffa2002. Tried running the game in pure MS DOS. However, only the FM works and no sound effects despite setting the IRQ similar to Win 98 dos. I remember reading another Vogons post where a member had similar freezing issue with an ESS Solo-1 card. I tried running the game with an ESS Solo-1 under windows 98 using WDM drivers (have not tried VXD drivers yet) and was getting the same freezing. Also thinking if this could be an issue with my chipset (845GEBV2 motherboard).

Hmmm, maybe the issue is related to the sound driver itself... Do you use any memory managers like EMM386? Maybe you can try disabling it and running the game again as it may be affecting the way the sound driver is loaded into memory.
Also try disabling any other drivers you might have in both autoexec.bat and config.sys (mouse, cdrom, etc. leaving only sound). If it works, you can enable one by one to see what may be causing the issue.