I can not find any PCI card joystick ports that are not on a sound card. You can disable everything on the sound card except the joystick and you won’t have a conflict. The joystick drivers are separate from the audio drivers. The only card I had other than a sound card with a joystick port was an IDE controller with serial ports that was an ISA slot card.
I had one in a computer I had at one point, but it was ISA, not PCI.
Actually there were a bunch of ports on it (parallel and serial and something else I think), not just the gameport, but it wasn’t a soundcard. They did used to sell ones with just the gameport, often with a little knob to adjust the polling rate or some such, but again, these were ISA.
I don’t know if Vista or 7 support gameport or not, but I’ve gotten my old Sidewinder to work in XP. I don’t remember if I have it plugged into my SB Live (PCI card) or SB 16 (ISA card) though I don’t know if it would matter.
Yeah, I still have an SB 16 in my desktop. I seriously need new hardware.