I've found some adjacent threads on similar ESS audio issues, but I have not been able to resolve this on my Win98SE install.

Laptop is a Compaq Armada M300. Pentium III 500 MHz with built in ES1978 Maestro-2E PCI AudioDrive. Chipset on this is Intel 82440BX/ZX AGPset + PIIX4M. Fresh install of Win98 SE, and installed the original Compaq sound drivers from Softpaq.

Currently the drivers (VXD) are working in Windows. I have a "Maestro DOS Games/FM Devices" entry:

I've found some ESS DOS driver files from the forum and added those to my Autoexec.bat and Config.sys files. At startup I see these load:

These match the available hardware resources in device manager for the "Maestro DOS Games/FM Devices" entry (SB IO 220H, IRQ = 5, DMA = 1)

I am able to select and test Music in DOS games, but not SFX. I have tried all types of sound card type in the games (plain SB, SB 2.0, SB Pro 1.0, SB Pro 2.0) with the matching settings (address 0x220, IRQ 5, 8-bit DMA = 5, 16-bit DMA = 5). Any attempt to play SFX fails, "Playback failed, possibly due to an invalid or conflicting DMA channel":

Running MSINFO I don't see any hardware / address conflicts:

I feel like I am close, but not sure what to do next. Other threads I have found are talking about DDMA vs TDMA and PCISET stuff with a focus on the ESS Solo and similar but not exactly the same configurations. I'm not really sure if relevant or where to go with those threads (PCI sound cards and Chipsets from various manufacturers...) and (Re: Compaq N600c: hangs on playing audio in DOS, music works). Should I try to swap to WDM drivers?

Any help appreciated! Thanks!