Hi!

I've never heard of BIOS support for a joystick/game port.

Windows provides a virtual joystick (vjoyd, IIRC) driver that probably
initializes the port and gets it to the point of working before you attempt
to use it.

The gameport is usually implemented by way of the sound card/sound chip.
Chances are you need a DOS enabler to get the sound chip up and running so
you can use the game port.

Most likely you need this:
ftp://ftp.esstech.com/pub/audio-mode...DOS_config.zip

(quoting the readme: "ESSCFG.EXE allows the user to configure the ESS sound
chip with a base address, a DMA channel, an IRQ channel, and an address for
the MPU-401 port, if a wavetable is supported by the sound card.")

to get the card/chip running and initialized before you can use the
joystick.

Chances are that the ESS1788 is an ISA PnP device and must be initialized
somehow before anything can see or use it. The older computer is more likely
to have used a chipset that's always enabled and/or has its resources
assigned in some "hardwired" method, such as jumpers, switches or possibly
even BIOS settings.

William