CTCM will work with Creative cards only. For PnP under DOS, install the Intel Configuration Utility ("ICU"). That's all you need to get full PnP under DOS and it consumes only 2 kb for the TSR.

^ thanks for that will give it a shot

finally I got the card working with ICU , thanks derSammler for the help!

it also proved quite a task to find an installation of ICU to download, I could get some half-versions of it (maybe for specific hardware?) but I did find the latest R1.43 (AFAIK) with a nice installation program that takes care of almost everything, I am attaching it to this thread just in case anyone else has the same problems in the future. You can extract both files in a directory and install from there, no need to use floppies if you don't want to.

Yes, R1.43 was the last one. Can't remember it was hard to find, but sometimes it seems useful things vanish quite fast from the net.

it seems from your screenshot that the card was already initialized before the PNP Config manager was loaded. Hence it was loaded/initialized 2 times ?!?

That's just how the gravis setup put things on the config files. Without the ICU properly detecting the GUS PNP the gravis setup was complaining that no card was found and just exited. After ICU and proper PnP configuration the gravis setup detected the card and modified the config files to it's liking... one init via config.sys one via autoexec:

1DEVICE=C:\GRAVIS\ULTRASND\IWINIT.EXE ID=GRV00001 INTERWAVE=C:\GRAVIS\ULTRASND\IW.INI
2DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS /TESTMEM:OFF
3DOS=HIGH
4FILES=30
5DEVICE=C:\PLUGPLAY\DRIVERS\DOS\DWCFGMG.SYS

1@REM ===== Gravis initialization (1.3) =====
2@SET INTERWAVE=C:\GRAVIS\ULTRASND\IW.INI
3@SET IWDIR=C:\GRAVIS\ULTRASND
4@C:\GRAVIS\ULTRASND\IWINIT.EXE
5@C:\GRAVIS\ULTRASND\GETIWENV.EXE > C:\GRAVIS\ULTRASND\SETIWENV.BAT
6@CALL C:\GRAVIS\ULTRASND\SETIWENV.BAT
7@SET ULTRADIR=C:\GRAVIS\ULTRASND
8@REM ===== Gravis initialization ends =====
9@ECHO OFF
10PROMPT $p$g
11SET PATH=C:\GRAVIS\ULTRASND;C:\DOS;C:\UTILS
12SET TEMP=C:\TEMP

Initalization in config.sys is redundant and can be removed without any consequences.
If things fail "iwinit -v9" sometimes gives some additional info useful for tracking issues.

Thanks for the Disks keropi! You're an angel!