Ok good to know!

I bought a Sound Blaster Live! 1024 (aka the Live! Value) card back in 2000 and used it my Celeron 566 running Windows 98SE without any problems (I can look up the CT model number a bit later on). Mine still came with legacy DOS drivers as well.
I even carried over this sound card when I upgraded my PC and installed Windows XP.
I do recall that Creative later on released the Live! Driver Pack, which I then always used, but I think that was under Windows XP (it's been a while since I used my Live! card 🤣).

I used a Soundblaster Live 1024 back in 2000-2002 with Windows 98. It caused countless crashes. Got rid of it when my new Athlon XP motherboard had integrated sound.

The last kx drivers to support Win98SE are 3537.
e.g. from here http://www.kx.webz.cz/download.htm

Have you tried putting the card into another PCI slot? Maybe it needs busmastering capabilities which it cannot access in this specific slot? Also, trying the card in another system or just under another OS should provide clarity whether its toast or not.

kithylin wrote:

Phreeze wrote:

i often use the lvie cards and never had any problem ?
download the drivers from the creative site (look under legacy etc.)

Yes.. but have you actually used them in Windows 98 SE, or in Windows ME before? That is where all the problems and grief happens. They're fine and stable in XP And newer.

ofc, i don't use xp on any machine. 98se and ME. Perhaps i just had luck...

The card in the OP's original post is likely the infamous Dell OEM Live! card. They were a pain to get drivers working on even when the cards were new. Creative used to refer people to Dell to get the drivers and eventually they caved and put the drivers up on their site. Drivers should be on their site under "Sound Blaster Live 5.1 Digital (Dell)"

..

@kithylin: Look here http://www.kxproject.com/changes.php?language=en in the changelog of

01/21/2007 - Version 5.00.3538 (BETA, internal) released

they write in line two "Removed Win98 support". So 3537 is the last version supporting Win98SE.
To be precise it does not support Win98 nor Win95 due to WDM.

It is just a suggestion from me, nothing more.

...

I may have SoundBlaster Disc images.. I've found that the "web" drivers are shitty.. Yes this is my first post. 😉

....

kithylin wrote:

I wanted the Live! cards because they have the ability to play up to 1024 individual sound effects / voices in games (not all cards can do that) after you get the web update.

Just FYI this is software mixing done by the drivers. I think the card can do "only" 256 voices in hardware, possibly even less, I can't remember the specifics. I think it is mentioned in one of the driver updates, possibly the one where they bumped it up to 1024. If DirectX falls back to software mixing once the hardware limit has been reached (not sure if this happened in the Win98 era but it certainly did later on), you won't get any more performance compared to any other card that has hardware mixing up to 256 voices (which admittedly, there probably isn't much competition in the budget end of the market in this era either.)