(Thanks to /u/O_MORES for posting this elsewhere)
There’s a brand new HD audio driver for Windows 98/Me called WDMHDA.
Since it’s a WDM driver, it will play nice with the Sound Blaster Emulation Layer built into Windows 98/ME (sbemul.sys).
And it actually works. Here’s Windows 98 and this codec tested on a Ryzen 9 PC: https://youtu.be/uhWyH0TsrCc
IIRC, 98 needs a homebrew patch to not crash if you have more than 512MB of RAM.
Be careful, this DOS audio stuff is a rabbithole in and of itself. Apparently, no Sound Blaster emulation is perfect for all games and there are some things that only an ISA sound card can do. I think it was a fairly short list of problematic titles, though. I’ll return to post a link if I can find it. Probably on the forums of vogons.org or vcfed.org
the 512MB ram thing is true, but it’s just a single line of edit on system.ini, nothing difficult
If we’re talking DOS software in 98SE, there’s a few patches to limit the RAM seen by the OS to 512MB or 2GB for compatibility.
https://archive.org/details/Windows_98SE_Memory_Patch
yep rloew’s patches are great https://rloewelectronics.com/
though that much ram isn’t really necessary, setting MaxPhysPage=20000 (512MB) just works fine