With the sound driver(s) compiled into older kernels, it was virtually impossible to change the parameters that were selected at compile time. Now, each driver has an individual boot argument, and no defaults are set at compile time (i.e. you must supply a boot argument for older non-PNP ISA cards to be detected.) If information on your card is not here then check the files in linux/Documentation/sound/. You can typically use -1 for unused parameters or to disable various things like the 16 bit DMA channel(s).
This takes an argument of the form:
ad1848=io,irq,dma,dma2,type
This takes an argument of the form:
adlib=io
This takes an argument of the form:
mad16=io,irq,dma,dma16,mpu_io,mpu_irq.
This takes an argument of the form:
pas2=io,irq,dma,dma2,sbio,sbirq,sbdma,sbdma16
where the sb prefixed values are for the SoundBlaster emulation that the PAS16 provides. You should also use the sb= argument with the same values given for the SoundBlaster emulation.
This takes an argument of the form:
sb=io,irq,dma,dma2.
This takes an argument of the form:
uart401=io,irq.
This takes an argument of the form:
uart6850=io,irq.
This argument expects an I/O address only, and the most common one (for ISA cards) is opl3=0x388.
This takes an argument of the form:
opl3sa=io,irq,dma,dma2,mpu_io,mpu_irq.
This takes an argument of the form:
opl3sa2=io,irq,dma,dma2,mss_io,mpu_io,ymode,loopback,isapnp,multiple