Isn't it his *laptop* that has the OPL3 chip? I can't believe you're advising someone to open up a laptop.
Oh no I would never do that - most of them never get back together in one piece - I didn't realize it was a laptop ! 
Heheh, too late. I pulled most of it apart but short of destroying it, I couldn't get to the sound chip. Those things don't come apart very easily and there are no obvious screws to just pull it apart. I don't really care about this laptop that much anyway. If it was newer, I would never have attempted to pull it apart to see.
I found, that the ISA part of alsaconf doesn't work. If you disable say the Yamaha driver, it says it's going to add the next one down. It always tries to use the driver that's on the top of the list no matter what. When it asks if I want to try all IRQ and DMA combinations, if I chose yes, it takes a few seconds and then choses the driver that's at the top of the list. If I chose no, it hangs. I found that it trys to run this command
modprobe -r snd_op13sa2
and if I run that command by itself outside of alsaconf, it hangs and doens't do anything. In other words, alsaconf doesn't work for ISA cards, it just uses the first driver on the list.