ive been there with an older motherboard, but with a pci sblive card my sblive card is ct4830. some games will work inside win98 dosbox some other will crash. and will work better by restarting in ms dos mode. try use the wdm drivers for gaming inside win98 dosbox. wdm drivers manage to stop the crashing ive had with some dos games in windows they are better than vxd drivers. but not all games will work inside windows dosbox prince of persia is one of them. prince is working only in pure dos. also in order to have sound in pure dos the sblive need the ems manager (you already know that) some games wont play because of that. so 1 unistall the vxd drivers, install the wdm ones 2 remove any sblive parameters from autoexec.bat, and see what games play better in windows dosbox. the ones that are not play example prince of persia try them in pure dos. 3 for pure dos gamimg do this copy from your windows folder the pif that is named msdos games with ems and xms support paste it in your desktop, modify its autoexec and config parameters by adding the sblive papameters and use this pif for restarting in pure dos for your dos gaming

Don't try hard about it. Forget about any funny SB Live's DOS videos/reviews. PCB revision deosn't matter, in DOS they're all the same. You'll never reach even 90% old DOS games compatibility. "Old" - I mean SB/SBpro compatible games. SB Live will work as SB16 much perfect in later SB16 compatible games. Older games with Live is not good idea. Just add one more PCI card with good SB Pro compatibility and use both.

Some games won't work in Windows DOS session. Only pure DOS.
WDM is bad for Win9X gaming (I mean win games, so make your choice).

i never had any problem with wdm and win32 games . but maybe i m lucky and dont have a problematic game.

When using EAX in some configs in some games there are able freezes (about 1/4 sec, 1/2 sec, 1/8 sec) and lower perfomance at all. Seems very terrible, disturbs in dynamic games. VXD gives more perfomance and absence these short freezes.

are you sure those delays arent happening because. of slow cpu?? when my old mobo dies and moved in a newer ich6 mobo with pentium 4 at 2.8 ghz i didnt notice any slowdowns not even on silent hill 4. one of the last win98 compatible games.

It's not because slow system and/or hard game. In some cases happens often, in some cases almost no. I had this problem much with P4 3,4 and ICH5. I had this less with A-XP 2600+ and VT8235. And I never got it on any system with VXD installed.
Maybe depends on list of games. You play this one, I play other...

@truemaster - The sole reason why I got the Audio Card is to NOT use WDM drivers! I've used WDM drivers on "modern" built-in Realtek based AC'97 chips, and all I get is the famous SBEMUL.SYS emulation of SB Pro with no OPL/Midi. I've experienced it for many years, I wanted something different. Thanks for the *.pif file trick, might be handy! I will never install WDM drivers on the SB Live, so no reason to fight about something I'll never use 😀

@PARUS - Well, this was the only card I could afford. As I've said, if I was somewhat rich, I could build a nice Socket 370 build with an ISA SB16 card, and 3DFX Voodoo 3, but that's what I have currently 🙁
I know this is all meaningless in the days of DOSBox/PCem/86Box, but still, there's some feeling about using real hard that probably no one can describe, no matter how out-of-place it seems 😀
I know I would be in some problems (got an nForce2 board previously and had to give it back 😀 ) but didn't know the problems lie far more than just getting the driver to run in the first place.
Vortex 1 is quite expensive, and Vortex 2 is out of reach. How would my experience be better if I got a Vortex 1?

I've also experienced the "bad file allocation table, drive c:" message, probably not a good idea to constantly force shutdown the HDD every couple minutes, I guess 😀 This also might affect my DOS games experience.

I will post here my experience, in case someone else is in the same situation, or maybe simply as a warning to not try SB Live as a DOS gaming sound card...but I wanted to 😒

EDIT: What about YMF744? There are some in here not THAT expensive.

PCI YMF is a lottery and depends on your motherboard, I mean DDMA. In PC/PCI mode it is wonderful.
Vortex1/2 should work always or almost always with any mobo, uses TSR. But remember that you will not get 100% all DOS games compatibility with any PCI sound.

ok wdm is no go for you. but strange with wdm i get general midi on both doom2 and blood but no opl at all. on my newer and better retro rig the ich6 system with pentium 4 i ditch sblive because the dos driver is uncopatible with the southbridge. im using now the aureal vortex 2. there are still on ebay if youre interested. the aureal vortex also doesnt need any ems and has only vxd drivers. also the yamaha ymf is a good one. and there is a page here that some people manage to make it work on a way newer chipsets than yours and mine. but like parus said there is no 100% compatible pci audio card sadly for all of us since mobos with isa are really expensive.

Is it true the YMF cards only emulate Sound Blaster Pro, and not SB16 like the Live?
As for the 100% compatibility, I know now that it is not possible with PCI cards (took me that long to realise this, yes 😀 ), especially with the variety of sound options each game has 😒 But at least some compatibility is better than none 😀
MOD/S3M files sound somewhat better in DOS' Inertia Player than in XMPlay on my modern built-in Realtek chip, interesting 😜
No wonder Intel introduced AC97 and HD Audio standards to fix all the audio nonsense prior to 2002 😀 Too bad retro games got ass kicked because of that, but hey, they couldn't predict the future, and neither can we.

MrMateczko wrote:

Is it true the YMF cards only emulate Sound Blaster Pro, and not SB16 like the Live?

Yes. YMF-71x cards provide WSS compatible 16 bit support.

MrMateczko wrote:

As for the 100% compatibility, I know now that it is not possible with PCI cards (took me that long to realise this, yes 😀 ), especially with the variety of sound options each game has 😒 But at least some compatibility is better than none 😀

Hardware sideband technologies like DDMA and PC/PCI can completely overcome this limitation.

The level of compatibility you can get with a card like the sblive is fairly impressive. I found an ESS Solo-1 and that would have higher compatibility, as it does not require a TSR nor does it require EMM386.EXE to be loaded. Biggest problem is such setups tend to be very finicky and can be reliant on having the right motherboard and right BIOS settings to get it to work reliably.

ISA cards are always going to be more compatible, but if you want to turn a high end Athlon XP or Pentium 4 into a DOS gaming rig, you have few other choices than getting a PCI card with suitable ISA hooks and getting that working.