I have a NEC 385 on the Wave Table header and that worked!
I simply did a fresh Install of Windows 98SE, installed the original TB drivers from the TB website and things worked inside of W98SE and also when shutting down into MS-DOS mode.
It did get an odd IRQ assigned (the manual mentioned not enabling PnP OS in the BIOS if you want DOS SB Pro compatibility) but Descent and Doom worked just fine (just had to set the resources correctly).
Only thing I couldn't figure out was how to adjust the mixer under DOS because the NEC 385 is very loud / speech quite soft. I found a .cfg file with entries for the mixer but unsure what to put there.