I think it's because it could be a Creative propietary way of accessing Midi and most games have a Generic Midi or Roland MT-32 option.

well dosbox emulates the mpu 401 interface and should work much better in the next version (pm2 sounds so cool 😀.
mt-32 is a thing that needs a rom, so no go as far as I'm concerned.

The SB16 emulates the MT-32 and MPU-401 with the FM Synth. DOSBox doesn't seem to emulate this. It redirects MPU-401 to the host MIDI driver instead.

Check the Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster

1From Wikipedia
2---------------------------------------------
3Sound Blaster 16
4
5The next model, Sound Blaster 16 (June 1992) introduced 16-bit sampling to the Sound Blaster line. The cards also featured a connector for add-on daughterboards with wavetable synthesis capabilities complying to the General MIDI standard. Creative offered such daughterboards in their Wave Blaster line. Finally, the MIDI support now included MPU-401 emulation (in dumb UART mode only, but this was sufficient for most MIDI applications). The Wave Blaster was simply a MIDI peripheral internally connected to the MIDI port, so any PC sequencer software could use it.

It's talking about the daughterboards. Not about Sound blaster 16. Quite a difference.

The daughterboards (such as the Waveblaster or Yamaha DB50XG (which I own)) were NOT integrated with the standard SB16 card. It was expensive expansion card that few bothered to get, and what wikipedia says, "wavetable synthesis capabilities complying complying to the General MIDI standard". Like an old GM compatible synth, but without the keyboard. Like the Windows software synth, but in hardware.

Directing the whole thing to Windows (or whatever the host OS is) is a much better solution, cause that's pretty much what the SB16 did with the daughterboards. Just re-directing the calls. And one had to use "MPU-401" with the software to use the daughterboard anyway. No software I'm aware of had any specific "use daughterboard" option.

Directing the whole thing to Windows (or whatever the host OS is) is a much better solution, cause that's pretty much what the SB16 did with the daughterboards. Just re-directing the calls.

It's just that an extra option to use the emulated Adlib/Soundblaster for MIDI would be nice.

And one had to use "MPU-401" with the software to use the daughterboard anyway. No software I'm aware of had any specific "use daughterboard" option.

But how come if you use MPU-401 with a DOS game or MIDI player, and run the game/application in Win9x on a computer with an SB16, the game/application would use the FM Synth? It's because Windows redirects MPU-401 to the Windows MIDI Mapper, and when you have an SB16, the Windows MIDI Mapper can access the FM Synth. And yes, it does work with games/applications that use MT-32, although the instruments don't sound correct, because Windows doesn't change MT-32 instrument patches into GM instrument patches.

This is exactly was dosbox is doing. If you have a machine with sb16, dosbox will redirect mpu-401 to windows midi mapper which will play through sb16 device. I don't see why you'd need this...every game has an option to use sb16 as midi...there are less games that support general midi and/or mt32.

So that means the MPU-401-to-General MIDI redirection is done by Windows, not the SB16 after all. Sorry......

Before the SB16, if you wanted to connect an MT-32 or Sound Canvas to the joystick/MIDI port of your SB/SBPro/etc., you had to run a TSR driver or use a game that had special support for it because the cards didn't use a standard way (e.g. MPU-401) of letting games talk to the external synths.

The SB16 could emulate the MPU-401 in hardware, which allowed all games to talk to an external or daughter-card synth connected to it, without needing any special drivers.

DOSBox emulates an MPU-401, but routes the MIDI signals sent to it out to your OS's MIDI driver. That way, whatever MIDI driver you have selected in Windows/Linux/whatever acts like an external MIDI synth connected to the virtual DOSBox machine (via the virtual MPU-401). This means you can install Munt in Windows to have it emulate an MT-32 for you, or use Roland Virtual Sound Canvas to emulate an SC-55/88, or connect a MIDI keyboard via USB and use it as an external synth (I've done all three) - the possibilities are endless.