So every so often, a game will run fine, but remain soundless because my Sound Blaster clone just isn't 'Sound Blastery' enough. Next time I'll buy Sound Blaster. PC's could use a little more standardization. To find out your memory situation, type 'MEM' at the DOS prompt. Much has been written about the great PC bugaboo 'conventional' memory.
Some games are particularly greedy for conventional memory.
To accommodate this need you have to disable as many TSR's as you can. Better yet, use a boot disk. If they don't, type 'help' at the DOS prompt then click on 'Boot-disk'. You may also have to edit your config. Most game manuals have a technical supplement where they detail exactly how to edit these files, including specific lines to add.