You're the one with the board, you are probably better placed to say what chip it is exactly than we are. It's an AC'97 codec in any event, but I've not found any pics good enough for a positive ID. It's the small square chip to the rear of the AGP slot. My guess (based on logo) is it's one of the SigmaTel STAC chips.

If you ID the chip and find a driver, be sure thay your Via 4-in-1 chipset drivers are installed first, as the guts of the sound solution are in the Via 686A southbridge and won't work properly if it's not recognized by Win98SE (but tbh, if you install *any* other drivers before the 4-in-1 you are likely to have a very bad time)

dionb wrote on 2022-05-02, 22:20:

You're the one with the board, you are probably better placed to say what chip it is exactly than we are. It's an AC'97 codec in any event, but I've not found any pics good enough for a positive ID. It's the small square chip to the rear of the AGP slot. My guess (based on logo) is it's one of the SigmaTel STAC chips.

If you ID the chip and find a driver, be sure thay your Via 4-in-1 chipset drivers are installed first, as the guts of the sound solution are in the Via 686A southbridge and won't work properly if it's not recognized by Win98SE (but tbh, if you install *any* other drivers before the 4-in-1 you are likely to have a very bad time)

Thank you. I'll open the system up and come back with a name or a photo of something. Otherwise I might see if I kept my SB Audigy. It's not for DOS anyway, just for W98 Multimedia stuff and I've had a decent experience before with it on another system. 😀

Update: It's a Sigmatel STAC 9700. It can be seen in the photograph below. Hope this helps someone. 😀

If you have a Audigy, that would be vastly superior, both in terms of SNR, lower CPU load and positional audio.

STAC 9700 drivers are tricky, SigmaTel never offered direct downloads, so you need drivers from a product they were included on. Most links are to malware sites. But I believe the Gigabyte GA-8TX-C board had the same chip, and Gigabyte still has (slooow) downloads for ancient stuff. Try here:
https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-8TX-C … pport-dl-driver

The Chaintech sound driver download section has live links via the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20010405143951/ht … iver/driver.htm