As I mentioned earlier, someone here at Vogons patched CTCM a while ago, I hope he/she will turn up to take credit. This can help with further issues at a true DOS install.
The files I archived from that thread are here.

I spent quite a bit of time mucking around with the AWE64 Creative software.

I can see now why Creative tried to render CTCU useless from MS-DOS mode. When you have Windows, which is a PnP OS, you are supposed to configure the resources in Windows. When you run CTCM and DIAGNOSE these changes will be applied to DOS.

Changing resources in Windows and DOS could lead to problems.

So what about users who just use MS-DOS 7.1?

Well if you built your MS-DOS 7.1 installation from a W98 SE bootdisk and manually transferred files from an existing Windows installation there won't be a winbootdir environment variable and CTCU will work just fine. So will INSTALL.EXE which is a bit odd but I've seen it time and time again.

So this leaves MS-DOS 7.1 users who installed Windows and then hid or disabled Windows through entries in MSDOS.SYS. As they can't go back into Windows and have winbootdir environment variable, they do indeed require a working CTCU.

Note that there is also mention of Intel's ISA Configuration Utility (ICU), but I've never seen one.

I used to create MS-DOS 7.1 installations with boot disk and manually transferring files but now that I learnt a bit more about the whole thing I just installed W98 SE on my Pentium 100 Time Machine PC and configured MS-DOS mode as per recent video / tutorial and used CTCMBBS and 95DOSAPP to get it working in MS-DOS mode.

So if you have Windows on your machine there shouldn't be any reason to touch CTCU. Configure resources in Windows device manager.

Many thanks for all your help. I really appreciate it 😀

Phil: as a subscriber I saw you uploaded a video regarding DOS 7. I will try to install it as you did and post back how was it.

Edit: downloaded patched CTCM thanks to Jolaes76. Works great! 😀

Sorry to revive an old thread, but it took me some time to find a solution to my problem and this was the fix. (Maybe others are looking too.)

Thanks Jolaes76 for attaching the edited CTCM & CTCU exes, they worked a treat to get my gameport working in DOS 7.1. (Linky download/file.php?id=16560)
Also a thanks to Phil for the Sound Blaster setup under DOS 7.1 Guide. (Found here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiSM5pUGab4)

The Problem (for searches)
Problem with gameport in DOS 7.1 on a Creative AWE64 Value CT4500, which works fine in Windows 98SE. No apparent port conflicts in bios, but when booting into DOS (using Phil's Soundblaster setup method for DOS 7.1) CTCM was reporting "Successfully configured 2 of 3 Creative Plug and Play devices."

The line in my autoexec.bat for CTCU /s (/s for silent mode) was giving an error about not running in 9x dos. Swapping to the exes in the first post worked a treat now i get "Successfully configured 3 of 3 Creative Plug and Play devices." from CTCM and CTCU runs and reports updating Plug n Play settings to configs.