The laptop itself is a Toshiba Satellite A70 PSA70A-0W700W, but Belarc Advisor lists the audio as Realtek AC97. Specifically, CNet lists the audio codec as Realtek ALC250. The latest driver I can find from Realtec that supports 98SE is A4.06. It states DirectX8 is needed for "advanced features". So, I installed that, and when it didn't fix the below issues, I upgraded it to DirectX9c.
Once the drivers are installed, it does appear in the Device Manager but there's a conflict. The Device status states: "The NTKERN.VXD, MMDEVLDR.VXD device loader(s) for this device could not load the device driver. (Code 2)."
-dosfan
...The CMI8738 is Sound Blaster Pro compatible without any special TSRs or device drivers and only needs to be initialized properly via the SETAUDIO utility though I had to patch it so that a configuration register is set to update the DMA address and count registers during DMA transfers since some games actually check them...