I received the Roland SC-88 (basically a third-generation Sound Canvas, with full SC-55/SC-55MkII compatability) and MT-32 MIDI synthesizers that I won on eBay over the last couple of weekends. I was surprised that they both arrived on the same day, as the SC-88 was shipped around a week ago and the MT-32 only a couple days ago.

Unfortunately I won't be able to test the MT-32 until tomorrow because I need to swing by Radio Shack and pick up some big-phono-to-RCA adapters because the MT-32 is so old that it has two mono female jumbo phono jacks for output instead of RCA jacks or a stereo headphone-sized phono jack. I also need a power strip because I'm using nearly every electrical outlet in my room and ironically had to unplug my MIDI keyboard in order to plug in the SC-88.

I connected the line out (RCA jacks) of the SC-88 to the line in (headphone jack) of my PC's on-board sound and unmuted the line-in input. My computer mixes the SC-88's output with its own in hardware and I hear both from my Logitech Z-5500D speakers at the same time (which finally arrived a few weeks ago, BTW).

I connected the MIDI-Out of my USB-to-MIDI adapter (that I bought in order to use my MIDI keyboard with my new computer) to the MIDI-In of the SC-88 and then set my Windows XP default MIDI output device to be the USB-to-MIDI adapter.

I tested lots of games with it using DOSBox and things went well. The DOS games I can remember trying include: Dune 2, TES: Arena, Betrayal at Krondor (floppy), Space Quest 4 (CD-ROM), Quest for Glory 4 (CD-ROM), and X-Wing (CD-ROM). Had a little trouble with Arena that was solved by factory resetting the synth (it's highly programmable and saves settings via battery backup). Didn't notice much difference between SC-55 and SC-88 modes. Dune 2 sounded great - quite a bit different than any software synth I've tried with it over the years. I think I first played it on my cousin's computer, which had an SCC-1, but it was 15 years ago so I don't remember what it truly sounded like. Quest for Glory 4's cheesy intro music seemed better than most - if not all - softsynths that I've tried (it has some weird arrangements that expose all kinds of subtle tuning errors in many softsynths, plus it uses electric guitars prominently, which are a bane of MIDI). I was disappointed that the Choir Aahs in the Arena intro sounded more synthetic than human, but I guess that's what Roland was going for, as I found some variation sounds that actually sounded more human.

I noticed that the SC-88 has support for the default set of CM-64 sounds, but didn't bother trying since I'll hopefully have a working MT-32 tomorrow.

Also tested with my own MIDI compositions in Cakewalk SONAR. Sounds generally less muddy than the Live/Audigy soundfont synths that I originaly composed them on, and chorus and reverb effects are a lot more noticable and higher quality (in my opinion). Playing with SC-55 and SC-88 specific variations of GM instruments was fun, but I didn't notice much difference in about two thirds of the variations that I tried. Also, it seemed a lot easier to balance/arrange the volume levels of the instruments/tracks than it was using soundfont synths (or software synths in general).

I also tried playing a few of the Sound Canvas tracks from the old Windows 3.1 game Mordor, using MIDI-Bar. I noticed that the notes cut off when I told MIDI-bar to stop playing, and they still kept going when I started a new song, but this is almost certianly a bug or oversight in MIDI-bar.

I'm falling asleep, so I'd better finish here for now...