Considering your budget, I would suggest a Sound Blaster Live. It will work great for Win9x gaming while also providing SB16 emulation and General MIDI music for DOS games. However, in older titles that only support FM synth music, the SBLive emulation won't sound so good.

Ideally, you want to pair it with a cheap ISA card such as a Yamaha YMF719-S for genuine OPL3 and better DOS compatibility.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2021-01-04, 17:55:

Considering your budget, I would suggest a Sound Blaster Live. It will work great for Win9x gaming while also providing SB16 emulation and General MIDI music for DOS games. However, in older titles that only support FM synth music, the SBLive emulation won't sound so good.

Ideally, you want to pair it with a cheap ISA card such as a Yamaha YMF719-S for genuine OPL3 and better DOS compatibility.

Thanks, Joe. I think that, given the circumstances, I'll get a Soundblaster Live for now and then maybe upgrade in the future if necessary. Tbh, your sound clips in the first link don't sound that bad to my ear. Then again, even back "in the day" (when I was a kid and presumably my hearing was better than it is now) I had a hard time distinguishing the best quality sound cards from the average ones.

If PCI I would also suggest Yamaha YMF7x4 XG . For ISA, what Joseph said. YMF719-F , you can still find them at nice prices. You can try PCI CMI8738 , it has SBpro SB16 and FM.

If ISA is available, I would also recommend ESS Audiodrive cards (like ES1868 or ES1869). They don't have genuine OPL3, but their ESFM implementation of OPL3 is arguably best in the business (I would say miles better then CQM or Live! emulation), they also have bug free wavetable available and can be bought for next to nothing.

I second the ESS 1868 as a good choice for ISA. They're easy to find, cheap, and I was pleasantly surprised with their quality.

Just a quick note here. While ISA sound cards are excellent for DOS gaming, many of them exhibit crackling and popping when used to play Win9x games. This can be somewhat remedied by disabling sound hardware acceleration, but that usually slows the system down to a crawl.

For best results, use a PCI sound card for Windows gaming and an ISA sound card for playing DOS games.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2021-01-05, 04:20:

Just a quick note here. While ISA sound cards are excellent for DOS gaming, many of them exhibit crackling and popping when used to play Win9x games. This can be somewhat remedied by disabling sound hardware acceleration, but that usually slows the system down to a crawl.

For best results, use a PCI sound card for Windows gaming and an ISA sound card for playing DOS games.

Agree with this
OP doesn't mention dos gaming which is the only reason you would want an ISA card

Pure Win9x PC's on a budget I don't see any reason you wouldn't go with a SBLive! in this day and age unless for some very specific reason like compatibility, availability, etc

OP said:

RetroLiz wrote on 2021-01-04, 17:35:

I intend to play Windows 98 and DOS games.

Yet it's true my reply was probably incomplete as I was just seconding ES1868 recommendation from the previous poster for an ISA sound card for DOS.
I would definitely recommend pairing it with a SB Live! for Win9x. That's what I run in my Celeron build.

So they did, my mistake I'm the one who can't read it seems

Get an ES1868 sound card if you want a good mix of price/compatibility/sound quality.

I forth the ESS cards fore Dos.

When I read the specs of the IBM Aptiva Series E Model 2158 it seems like it contains an ESS Solo-1 PCI sound chip integrated on the motherboard already. This might be very suitable for both DOS and Windows gaming.

Kamerat wrote on 2021-01-05, 18:19:

When I read the specs of the IBM Aptiva Series E Model 2158 it seems like it contains an ESS Solo-1 PCI sound chip integrated on the motherboard already. This might be very suitable for both DOS and Windows gaming.

Second that. In Windows it doesn't do anything special, but solidly outputs sound at WSS spec 48kHz, in DOS it's one of the best-behaved PCI chipsets.