I want to find this out because I was just having a discussion with someone about not being able to have winamp run in the background for mp3s on 486's, (they barely did it if it was the only program running) - and it got me to thinking "how low can you go with soundfonts and the microsoft sw synth? (Also soundfonts on one of those software midi interfaces like coolsoft or bassmidi or timidity or fluidsynth)
I once tried XP's own GM synthesizer on a Pentium 100 and the sound was sluggish. Hardware wavetable worked fine.
If you talk about the MS MIDI synth specifically, it will require a reasonably fast Pentium I suppose.
There are other SW synths that are faster, so you could probably find one that is acceptable on 486.
I believe Cubic Player allows you to play MIDI files using the GUS patch set. That might be the way: http://www.cubic.org/player/doc/node35.htm
I used to run WinGroove on my 5x86/100 way back when. I imagine it would work well on most decent 486es. Really impressive patch set quality considering its size too.
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