Take a look at Unisound UNISOUND - Universal ISA PnP Sound Card Driver for DOS v0.81b

I don't know why the DOS install of the drivers hangs. Looking at the zip, just running ESSCFG should be enough, without the need to run the installer. Just make sure to put the proper SET BLASTER= line in your autoexec.bat.

Make sure to use resources that don't conflict with your sound blaster, or just don't initialize it if it's a PnP model.

I also recommend booting directly into DOS by pressing F8 during Windows boot, restarting into MS-DOS Mode can leave cards in a strange state.

Yes you’ll need to use the win95 drivers to make it work in a dosbox, the DOS driver is for pure DOS. Within windows 95 you should see the card listed in the device manager, and from there you can set the resources that will be available in a dosbox. You’ll need to handle resource conflicts with your SB16 though so it can get ugly.

Another option is to simply use a dual boot - Win95 does of course have DOS running underneath and it’s easy to implement a dual boot with a bit of fiddling around - google for a guide. Then you can just use the DOS drivers which are super simple for ESS

Thanks for the suggestions. Out of interest, I formatted my drive and installed pure DOS 6.22 and I ended up with the same issue with the DOS drivers (it froze when I ran the install EXE...) not sure what's going on. Maybe it's the card I bought... So dual boot won't help since it's not working in pure DOS in the first place. But I think I will go for a dual boot setup in the long-run for maximum compatibility with all games I want to run.

Next step when I have time is to remove the SB16 and check if that's causing conflicts/issues when they're both connected. If that doesn't make a difference I'll also try the Unisound driver (does it allow multiple cards to be connected/configured in parallel?)

telecommand wrote on 2021-06-22, 04:31:

Thanks for the suggestions. Out of interest, I formatted my drive and installed pure DOS 6.22 and I ended up with the same issue with the DOS drivers (it froze when I ran the install EXE...)

Try these drivers.

The ones from Phil's website didn't work for my ESS 1868F either.

had the same situation, running the drivers from phils website just hangs (in pure DOS)

using the driver package from Joseph works though

issue is I am not getting any sound from the wavetable connector, I have S2 board connected to the header, MPU add is set to 330 and no music plays, hmmm ...

the volume settings that come with above driver are different to the ones in the phils drivers, there is no option for wavetable volume. EDIT: actually there is auxb but when I add vol setting say 10, it suddenly produces a static noise in the background and still no music coming when general midi 330 address selected in games.