I've been experimenting with ESS based cards in Windows 9x to see how they support Sound Blaster/Adlib in DOS games. The cards I tested were Ratoc REX-5572, Eiger and Panasonic KXL-D745/D20. The quick result is that Panasonic is the best card.
The long report is as foloows.
I've tested the cards on two laptops: IBM TP 360CE(W95) and IBM TP X60s(W98). The latter is a relatively new machine and does not support W98 officially. Yet can run it and most things work fine.
Ratoc and eiger cards along with standard drivers install a device called ESS AudioDrive DMA Emulation . One can see it in the device manager.
The resources that cards use a re following:
Ratoc: Port 240, IRQ 15, DMA 3 (emulation)
Eiger: Port 220, IRQ 5, DMA 1 (emulation)
Panasonic: Port 220 and 388, IRQ 10, no dma emulation.
Despite the fact that first two cards have the DMA emulation it does not help much, rather the opposite.
The games in which I could get sound are:
Ratoc: Heroes of Might and Magic 2 (PCM, FM)
Eiger: Heroes of Might and Magic 2 (PCM, FM), Chasm the rift (PCM), GTA1(PCM)
Panasonic: Heroes of Might and Magic 2 (PCM, FM), Chasm the rift (PCM), DOOM(FM), Prince of persia (PCM, FM), Duke 3D (FM), GTA1(PCM), Warcraft 2 (setup tests both FM and PCM fine, but the game crashes).
EDIT: All said above about Panasonic is 100% applicable to EXP Soundnote+CD-ROM device. It works likewise well.