I'm looking for Sound Blaster compatibility under DOS on a relatively fast (Pentium 3 or 4 class) machine and I think I've noticed a pattern of motherboard manufacturers providing incorrect information about the capabilities of their onboard audio. Was this something that happened a lot in that area?

For example from the Epox 8KHA+ manual:

* Built-in AC97 Digital Audio (by VIA VT8233) - Dual full-duplex Direct Sound channels - H/W Sound Blaster Pro for DOS legac […]
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* Built-in AC97 Digital Audio (by VIA VT8233)
- Dual full-duplex Direct Sound channels
- H/W Sound Blaster Pro for DOS legacy compatibility
- FM synthesis for legacy compatibility
- Supports game and MIDI port

I don't think it means that the motherboard is compatible with a Sound Blaster Pro card, because it has no ISA slots, and this is shown under the "AC97" bullet point, so I'm pretty sure it was meant to indicate SB emulation was available. However everything I find online says that VT8233 doesn't support such emulation, and I got the same error message as seen in this post when I tried VIAUDIO.COM.

And the MSI MS-7104/PM8M-V's manual says:

l VIA VT8237R chipset (487 BGA)
- Integrated Hardware Sound Blaster/Direct Sound AC97 audio

That is an even closer match to the chipset the poster above had trouble with so I have no reason to believe that.

Is this something that motherboard manufacturers commonly got wrong when Sound Blaster compatibility started to disappear and I shouldn't trust them? Did VIA keeping promising this compatibility and fail to deliver? Or is there some chance there is really compatibility there?

I realise that the solution is probably to use a sound card with SB compatibility rather than depend on the onboard audio.