Sound Blaster support on an ESS AudioDrive

[NeXT]

It's very uncommon to find an older laptop with a Creative sound card onboard and this is the case for my IBM PC110 PalmTop. It uses an ESS AudioDrive which for the most part will give audio playback in games but not in all my games. Two good examples are Alien Carnage and Mystic Towers where enabling Sound Blaster sound yields nothing and to get any sound at all you have to fall back to the good old PC speaker.
I have seen other people get "Sound Blaster Mode" audio on non-Sound Blaster cards (notably Crystal and Realtek) but how did they do it?

 

[Marrr]

1. Some cards require initialization, very likely for your chip you need esscfg.exe. (Which exactly chip do you have? There was entire series of Audiodrive chips, from ES488 to ES1869.)
2. Make sure you have appropriate BLASTER environment variable.

 

[Unknown_K]

ESS cards are pretty much cheap soundblaster clones and should have sound for all games that support soundblaster. The only time you have sound issues is if you have the IBM mwave chip in a Thinkpad.

 

[NeXT]

Yep. My bad, I forgot to initialize the chip first.
It's working now and man, how I have missed that awesome music only a Sound Blaster could make. :3