PCI card with good support for both A3D and EAX. It was never released.
Creative Live cards probably are the most compatible with Win9x games and acceptable in other things.
If you want to be original: Philips Seismic Edge PSC705, Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, YMF7x4 series. They are not for DOS, except the last if you have SB-Link on MB.

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

My cpu is a 800mhz slot A Athlon with 768mb of ram

Unless you take the proper precautions, Windows 98 is inherently unstable with more than 512 MB of RAM, and getting a non-Creative sound card will not help you at all.

i use the unofficial service pack 3.55, i have no problem at all running sound blasters with windows xp i normally run 98se on 1gb ram in most of my other rigs and one of my dell with 512mb max wont take any sound blaster either

I'm surprised no one mentioned the Windows Sound System (WSS)!
This one was literally made for Windows. 😉

Pretty much all 16 bit SB compatibles do WSS, so that's a bit unspecific.

I found a Xitel Storm Platinum a while ago. Not an easy Vortex 2 card to find and it comes with an optical out connector.

@ gdjacobs You're right. I meant the original WSS card.

I believe the original WSS can get quite pricey for little benefit.

Tertz wrote:

PCI card with good support for both A3D and EAX. It was never released.

I have a via chipset sound card that supports (if I recall) eax 1/2 and a3d version 1, might have version 2 but I can't recall.

Edit
Yep I'm right
http://www.viatech.com/en/silicon/legacy/audio/tremor/
That chip set has both eax 1/2 and a3d version 1.

Some ICEnsemble/VIA chipsets such as the ICE1724 support Sensaura (which does limited emulation of EAX and A3D). They're also generally capable of bit perfect digital output, so this might be the approach to use for high fidelity applications.

For Win98SE most cards are fine. I'm surprised those cards causing problems for you. All are well established cards for the Win98SE platform. I'm using Live 5.1 in my P4 based Win98SE system and a AWE64 Gold in my PII based Win95 system. Aureal cards are also good.