Well I bit the bullet, the options here are very limited so I just decided to go for this:

Original Sound Blaster Live! I hear they work well and has DOS drivers/emulation so it will do. I would have happily ordered the cards you all mentioned but sadly there are either none around or they are stupid money.

Finished spec:

Intel Pentium 4 2.26Ghz 533Mhz FSB SL6PB with brand new cooler
Intel Motherboard D865GLC with AGP 8x
Nvidia Geforce GF4 Ti4200 AGP 8X 128MB
Creative Sound Blaster Live PCI CT4620
512 MB DDR RAM
DVD ROM Drive
40GB Western Digital HDD
300W SFX PSU
New, small micro ATX case

dreamscape wrote:

Hi, I had no idea the chip set mattered on the motherboard and I've already purchased the board it's an Intel D865GLC. […]
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Hi, I had no idea the chip set mattered on the motherboard and I've already purchased the board it's an Intel D865GLC.

I must mention that I'm not looking for the best audio ever. All i want is for games such as DOOM, C&C, Wolf3d, Magic Carpet, Theme hospital etc to work period. I'm not looking for a pure DOS environment just for DOS games to work within a Windows 98 environment. My speakers as seen below are pretty old and rubbish anyway so I'm really not bothered how it sounds i just want sound.

Full spec of my machine once built is:

Intel Pentium 4 2.26Ghz 533Mhz FSB SL6PB with brand new cooler
Intel Motherboard D865GLC with AGP 8x
512 MB DDR RAM
Nvidia Geforce GF4 Ti4200 AGP 8X 128MB
DVD ROM Drive
40GB Western Digital HDD
300W SFX PSU
New, small micro ATX case

You may be ok to just use the onboard sound then.. if your version has the onboard sound. Running through a Windows DOS prompt is a bit easier to get working for DOS games on a PCI system.

I would still keep an eye out for a Yamaha YMF sound card though. If for nothing else besides the genuine OPL3. I've collected quite a few YMF-724 cards without even trying. Most of them came in lots of other computer parts.

Here is a bit more info in regards to PCI sound cards for DOS.
PCI sound cards and Chipsets from various manufacturers...

I would get an Audigy 2 ZS for Windows 98 usage and maybe something else for DOS games played through the Windows DOS command prompt.

Jade Falcon wrote:

I never once had said problems with an FX card, but older version of UT99 are buggy as hell with just about any card with OpenGL.

Shure... That is why I wrote that you need to update the games, and set AA and AF in order to get them gfx errors out. Even with the games all updated, I still get errors in UT99 with AA and AF disabled all together on an FX card. So yeah... Still problems with an FX to display games correctly. Especially if you run NFS Porche 2000. Sometimes it will start to have bad stearing, stear on its own and the smoke from any burnout will be a kind of blue haze, instead of the real color. This game are best on TNT2/GF2/Voodoo2/G400, and it really need DX7 in order not to act up.

UT99 was only to give an example of bad results with FX-5xxx cards. There are so many other mid-era 98 games, that does not work well. Nope... Don't go for FX cards, unless you can not get any other and want to spend a lot of time, in order to get every game working correctly. That is why I say GF4 as the newest nvidia cards for Win98 gaming. You have the choice to go for everything TNT2 to GF4, and Radeon-7000 to 9800. Plus the usual Matrox G400/G400-Max, Voodoo cards and so on. So why go for any FX cards is kind of mind bobbeling to me. Anyway... If they suit anyone, then go ahead with the FX. It's free to choose anything, just wanted to point out and make my case as to why I do not like them.

You had to be doing something wrong or something was wrong with your cards. like I sad I had FX cards in just about every setup and never had similar problems in 9x and cant think to of one 90s gane that has problems with the fx line.

well I'm happy to report this is now built and working great!

For anyone interested in the build, have a look on my site:

http://ridgeracer.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=5 … b32449d05303b61

Happy to report that the Sound Blaster Live! is running DOS games flawlessly and the Ti 4200 is running silky smooth.

Thanks for all the advice!