What do you want to do? No sound card is perfect for everything, so you'll almost always have to compromise according what you want to run or otherwise accomplish.

Well which sound card can play the most games and sound as good as the developer of the game intended ?

I get more use out of SB16's with wavetable and older SBpro 2's to be honest. They are nice to play with (I have a 1MB ultrasound and 4MB US PCI PnP in my collection).

You can also run multiple sound cards, but you still need to set some goalposts, or you will run out slots quickly .

Maybe you could start by determining what era of PC gaming you want to target . If you already have a retro machine, its specs should help narrow down your choices .

In my opinion, a Gravis Ultrasound is potentially worth it if you are into the early to mid-90s demoscene stuff and tracker-based music . Games that support the Gravis Ultrasound natively do sound good on it, but these games often also support General Midi for which there are much less expensive solutions .

Yes, you need a Gravis Ultrasound. In fact, you're gonna need two of them. One to install and use and one just to look at...

Joking aside, make a list of what you want to play/hear/do with a card and check if a GUS is a good option. As Darry said, for demoscene stuff and tracker music it is THE card, as the creators often targeted the GUS specifically. There aren't a lot of games that do that however; the number of games that use GUS hardware mixing is rather limited. Many games do support the Gravis Ultrasound, but treat it as PCM + General MIDI type device, which isn't its strong suit. When there is no direct Gravis support, but there is General MIDI/Sound Canvas/MT-32 support in a game, you still can get music by using Mega-Em, a piece of software, but it isn't compatible with all setups and limits the audio quality.

You can check http://www.wavetable.nl/category/comparisons/ to hear how it compares to other cards.

darry wrote:

You can also run multiple sound cards, but you still need to set some goalposts, or you will run out slots quickly .

Maybe you could start by determining what era of PC gaming you want to target . If you already have a retro machine, its specs should help narrow down your choices .

In my opinion, a Gravis Ultrasound is potentially worth it if you are into the early to mid-90s demoscene stuff and tracker-based music . Games that support the Gravis Ultrasound natively do sound good on it, but these games often also support General Midi for which there are much less expensive solutions .

For music GM is as good as GUS, but nothing beats digital sound from a GUS on those few games that support it (just listen to OMF2097). It is a very short list though, so unless you have money to burn you should only prioritise this if a number of must-have games support GUS natively for sound. It's a considerably shorter list than for the MT-32, which is (marginally) less expensive than a GUS.

Consider that - unless you get your hands on a GUS extreme - GUS Soundblaster emulation is crap (and even if you like it, it eats memory, so can't be used for the most demanding games), so in general you'll want a Soundblaster-compatible card next to it as well. That means you should consider the GUS more like an MT-32: a niche product for very specific games/apps that adds frills, but not the workhorse of your system (and I write this as someone who did do - or at least try - that for four years from 1995 onwards).

You can imagine an insane system with four cards and two external modules to handle just about anything:
- GUS for GUS (no SB or MIDI, so an ACE is fine)
- SB16 (or AWE32/64) for SB16 compatibility (no AdLib/SB(Pro) or MIDI)
- Aztech generation 1 card for AdLib, SB, SBPro, Covox, Disney
- MPU401 or work-alike with intelligent mode MIDI - or LAPC-1/SCC-1
- MT-32 or CM-32L/CM-64 (unless you have the LAPC-1)
- SC-55 or other GM module (unless you have the SCC-1 or choose a GM wavetable daughterboard)
(and yes, with SoftMPU you avoid the need for the MPU401 or work-alike, which drops the price significantly, but not the complexity)

But...

1) Go add up how much that pile would cost.
2) Consider the configuration hell - you need to be lucky with motherboard resource stuff and know *exactly* what you are doing to get all that running smoothly.
3) 95% of games just use SBPro 2.0 and GM (you can configure more, but don't get any extra features). You can get that with any old SBPro-compatible card and some MIDI solution (either a card with wavetable, a daughterboard or an external module). Cost for the card maybe EUR 15/USD 20, MIDI can be as crazy as you like, but a basic GM module can be had for maybe EUR 30/USD 40. That has you covered fine for normal stuff.

If you already have everything you normally need, stuff like this can be the cherry on the cake. I do and I'm slowly working towards it. But if you have to ask questions like this topic, leave these niche things alone and get some more experience with regular stuff first.

Majority if not all Epic Megagames titles were aimed at the GUS
but unless your into the demoscene stuff, its hard to justify the cost as much as I'd like one as well.