According to this FAQ, the Aria is not really a "special" soundcard, like for example the GUS, but rather a SB-type card with GM-compatible wavetable ROM, and some specialities. Considering that DOSBox' Soundblaster emulation and MIDI handling are very good, what would the benefits of "Aria emulation" be?

The FAQ you mentioned lists the voice recognition for When Two Worlds War. Apparently there was also a special Aria version of Star Trek 25th Anniversary with voice recognition. Both games took advantage of some feature of the Aria to provide voice recognition. Simply plugging a mic into a Sound Blaster would not work. I tried it on a real DOS PC years ago.

Hmmmm... Two games? The voice recognition is achieved through the "Aria Listener" software, it's not a hardware feature. Considering that voice recognition still pretty much sucks in 2008, i'd doubt the usefulness of that "feature". (;

Hmm, I suppose the game could have used some bundled Aria software, but it may also still have relied on some kind of additional hardware support, I have no idea.

Actually I've read that the voice recognition worked fairly well (you have to train it to your voice, which increases the accuracy).

All in all, a lot of effort for one or two games. I just thought I'd throw it out there. I like the game and always wanted to try the voice recognition.

ARIA is not a "SB-type soundcard". It's a proprietary standard 16 bit soundcard family, that also has hardware emulation of SB. Its PCM part is incompatible with SB, and wavetable ROM part (there are 512k and 1024k versions) is incompatible with MPU-401. Games and software must support ARIA directly or use its hardware SB (not even SB Pro) emulation. The MIDI part of the card is semi-programmable and may be set up to GM or MT-32 instrument map.

Yes, well, maybe they didn't know that in 2008. Talk about a bump! 😜