Latinum wrote on 2022-03-20, 16:57:

If you only have Windows 98/DOS machine, but a PCI motherboard without ISA slots, the foll0wing combo worked to get great Sound […]
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If you only have Windows 98/DOS machine, but a PCI motherboard without ISA slots, the foll0wing combo worked to get great Sound and great MIDI.

OS: Win 98SE (no patches)

Motherboard: ASUS P5PE-VM. This MB supports the Core Duo. I have the Extreme version to rip through DOS soft rendering. This MB supports Win 98 officially with drivers.

Sound card: Aureal Vortex (AU8820B2 chip). The more expensive Vortex 2 is *not* required. It is in PCI slot 3 (out of 3 total).

External MIDI device: Roland SC-8820.

Cable: Game port to MIDI connector cable.

P.S. - I attempted to get the Aopen Cobra (Yamaha YMF744L II) to work. But I could not get the Sound to work, and would crash Win 98. However, the Yamaha Synth MIDI is quite good. I also tried the SB Live, but it would not control the SC-8820 midi device. The Vortex does what the previous two could not do on my system.

I forgot to mention the SC-8820 RCA output to soundcard input jack cable you need, so that the Aureal will mix the MIDI output with sound effects.

The problem with the AV1 cards is that most of them don't have wavetable headers, though some of them can be modded to incorporate it, because the path is there on the PCB. That being said, there's a ton of AV2 cards out there that have the headers and that's what people are more likely to use and the price difference is negligible between them at this point. For the cards that do have the headers, we'd simply use the Dreamblaster X2GS on the headers, which offers full Roland GS MIDI for older games.