A PCI sound card will be great (and is your only option anyway). Who is complaining about the Audigy? I use an ZS and haven't had any issues with it, and will allow some excellent sound fonts to use with DOOM. The Vortext2 is also excellent, as is the Yamaha based PCI sound cards from what I read (haven't tried one yet myself).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNCg_zy1_d4

That's really good to know.

Today I went to the recycle facility in my city and found a creative ISA card, can't use it but for 50 cents it as worth getting it ans I found a PCI sound card.

It's a Genius V2 that has a ForteMedia FM801-AU 0117 HA077.00 chip.

Reading about it, it supports wavetable and dos games!

The only problem is that I can't find the drivers for it 😒

Any idea if other cards that use the same chipset might work?

PCI cards are only bad for pure DOS. In Windows 98, DOS games will often work as WIn98 provides sound compatibility when running DOS programs.

The FM801 ased card worked!!

I can use SoundBlaster and Adlib on Doom.
But no music with SounBlaster AWE32 🙁

What does this means? I've found a site claiming it had wavetable support.

Is SoundBlaster wavetable the same as SoundBlaster AWE32?

No. When a game has an explicit "AWE32" option (not "General MIDI"), that will only work with a genuine Creative Sound Blaster AWE32/AWE64.

However, every game that I know of (besides maybe 1 or 2 special cases) - if they have an explicit AWE32 option, they will have a General MIDI option, which will sound more or less exactly the same.

There are a few games that make direct use of the EMU chip. See further information in thread below.
Sound Blaster sample-based OST list?

These days, it's not very important. The AWE32 was a big deal when it came out, and many of us have fond memories of it. But today, if you just want old game music that sounds better than the stock Windows FM driver, there are plenty of options. A Sound Blaster Live! or Audigy is fine. Both support the same wavetable Sound Fonts that the AWE32 / AWE64 do -- and more, since they're less restricted by hardware limitations.

Specific AWE32 support in a DOS-based game is rarely all that useful. Normally it just uses the onboard 1MB wavetable ROM that the AWE32 had -- barely anything ever loaded any custom samples. And that 1MB ROM isn't very good. I love it, for reasons of nostalgia, but you can load any Sound Font GM bank that you want on a PCI Sound Blaster and have much better samples available to you. As others have said, you will need to select the General MIDI option instead of AWE32. Windows and the sound drivers should take care of the rest.

I don't know much about "other" brands -- I was a Creative guy up through the Live! product line, then didn't play many PC games for a while, so I just stuck to onboard audio from that point on. I'm just now going back to XP + Audigy to see what I missed.

SirNickity wrote:

Specific AWE32 support in a DOS-based game is rarely all that useful. Normally it just uses the onboard 1MB wavetable ROM that the AWE32 had -- barely anything ever loaded any custom samples. And that 1MB ROM isn't very good. I love it, for reasons of nostalgia, but you can load any Sound Font GM bank that you want on a PCI Sound Blaster and have much better samples available to you. As others have said, you will need to select the General MIDI option instead of AWE32. Windows and the sound drivers should take care of the rest.

Agreed. The EMU chipset was rarely utilized in DOS beyond providing generic wavetable synthesis. It's not a feature I would build an every day retro PC around, but it is interesting from a historical and technology perspective -- much like titles that used dual OPL2 on the first SB Pro.

SirNickity wrote:

Specific AWE32 support in a DOS-based game is rarely all that useful. Normally it just uses the onboard 1MB wavetable ROM that the AWE32 had -- barely anything ever loaded any custom samples. And that 1MB ROM isn't very good. I love it, for reasons of nostalgia, but you can load any Sound Font GM bank that you want on a PCI Sound Blaster and have much better samples available to you.

Specific AWE32 support has one advantage - it works in pure DOS mode.

Sure, but so do any number of cards with MIDI interfaces -- which you can connect to a much better synth than the AWE. 😀 Or, even if you reboot in DOS mode, you can patch it to another PC running a soft-synth with the AWE ROM as a Sound Font.

So:

1. Can I emulate AWE64 with AC97 somehow?

Yes, more or less. There are plenty of Sound Font players out there, that don't require any specific hardware. A Pentium D should have no trouble being the synth for games of an era where MIDI still mattered. Or use another computer to do it. (It doesn't take much.)

2. If I get a Audigy PCI card, can I get AWE64 working with windows 98?

As it turns out -- and this was news to me -- the Audigy drivers include a copy of the AWE ROM. If you load the synthgm.sbk file (which, on a real AWE, uses only the onboard ROM samples), it will load the AWE ROM and use it. Someone asked me to try this, and sure enough -- it works. Sounds like an AWE.

SirNickity wrote:

Sure, but so do any number of cards with MIDI interfaces -- which you can connect to a much better synth than the AWE. 😀 Or, even if you reboot in DOS mode, you can patch it to another PC running a soft-synth with the AWE ROM as a Sound Font.

Indeed, but you must buy (or already have) that extra MIDI device / daughterboard with that better synth. 😀

SirNickity wrote:

... Or, even if you reboot in DOS mode, you can patch it to another PC running a soft-synth with the AWE ROM as a Sound Font.

Potential solutions for this:
https://youtu.be/vSk9S1bkRS8
https://youtu.be/BQ759oY5EKg

SirNickity wrote:

2. If I get a Audigy PCI card, can I get AWE64 working with windows 98?

As it turns out -- and this was news to me -- the Audigy drivers include a copy of the AWE ROM. If you load the synthgm.sbk file (which, on a real AWE, uses only the onboard ROM samples), it will load the AWE ROM and use it. Someone asked me to try this, and sure enough -- it works. Sounds like an AWE.

Unfortunately the situation is more complicated than this since OP wants to use DOS games:
1. Both SB Live! and Audigy can only use the hardware based SF2 synth as default midi out for DOS programs if WDM drivers are installed. But with WDM drivers there is no Creative SB16 emulation only the Windows built in default SB emulation that is less compatible. And also WDM drivers are only an option for Win98SE, not for Win98FE.
It's not a coincidence that for Win9x Vxd drivers are more popular. But in case of Vxd drivers on Win9x and also with SB16 emulation driver loaded in DOS the Ensoniq based software engine is used (loading default.ecw as soundfont) instead of the SF2 hardware synth, so you cannot get any AWE compatibility.

2. Even with the SB Live and Audigy using the AWE ROM under Windows you cannot get AWE emulation per se.
This means that even with WDM drivers and synthgm.sbk loaded you cannot select SB AWE music output option in DOS games. You have to select General Midi (or Roland if GM is missing) instead.

OP should just get a Creative PCI card to play DOS games in Windows 98, using either the Creative VxD drivers (for SB16 emulation) or WDM drivers (if high quality HW soundfonts are more important to him), use General MIDI for music, and forget about using the explicit AWE option (as we know there is only a handful of games that make special use of the AWE synth in a way that differs significantly from General MIDI).

OP should forget about playing DOS games in pure DOS mode on this machine. Games that don't play nice from Win98 DOS window can probably be run via DOSBox on WinXP.