Quote Originally Posted by Markus
One more thing to try is deselecting any onboard sound and pnp in BIOS and adding the cheatcode pci=biosirq

Try to modprobe the module if lsmod shows nothing appropriate, or run modconf to do it.

Getting out of ideas really, and you're correct about the fact that an ISA card should work.
Hey holy crap we've made some headway here! okay... the short answer is that I now have sound again.

The long answer is the following: I did the modconf as suggested, enabled sbawe drivers and oss, adjusted the volumes, and voila -- wave output. midi still doesn't work, but I figure it's some other library that needs installation.

For diagnostic reasons, I rebooted, re-eneabled all the PNP stuff, ran modconf and enabled the same libraries, and still got wave (only, not midi) output. So it looks as this little conundrum has been resolved. 2 questions:

1) how do I enable MIDI... which modconf libraries would be required? opl3?
2) why did this work ok in 3.7 and requires manual settings in 3.8?

Thanks a million...