Oetker wrote on 2020-06-09, 13:50:
It depends on the game how it was intended to sound, some were intended to use FM, others are supposed to use a MIDI device and map MIDI to FM if none is present. A MIDI device can be a sound card's built-in wave table, an addon board, or an external module. Doom and Duke3D are 'intended' to use a Sound Canvas, which can take all three forms. Various MIDI devices/boards/cards might sound good or bad depending on the game. If you want to play around with a wave table module, you could get a DreamBlaster.
So what that means is that if your card doesn't have onboard wavetable, and it doesn't have a header, your only option is an external module, connected to the gameport.
Those modules tend to be expensive but of very good quality. Roland MT-32 and SC-55 are the two you will hear about most, because most game music was composed on them or with them in mind.
Your list contains two AWE64 cards. They can play (General) MIDI and are considered pretty average - nowhere near as good as Roland (or Yamaha or Korg) modules or internal wavetable cards, but better than the real low-end stuff. Some games have dedicated AWE support and use additional features of the cards.
To get an idea how it all sounds, just listen to some Youtube videos. Google the name of your favorite DOS game and add "Roland" or "AWE" to it. If the game supports it, somebody has probably made a video of it.
Note that MIDI = music (with very, very few exceptions). For sound effects you'll be using other functionality of your card. That's usually digital audio, which comes in Soundblaster, Soundblaster Pro and Soundblaster 16 flavours, as well as some more proprietary standards (which none of your cards use) and the underrated Windows Sound System standard, which is basically equal to SB16. Some older games use FM-synthesis for effects (and music) too. That's the OPL2/3 discussion. The industry standard for FM was set by the AdLib card, with a Yamaha OPL2 chip. OPL2 is mono, later OPL3 offered similar sound in stereo.
So you have three things:
1) FM synth ('real' OPL2 / 3, exact OPL2/3 clones, or re-implementations of varying quality) Your AWE64 and Vibra cards have Creative's CQM, which is considered average, but not as good as the 'real' thing. The Yamaha card has a real integrated OPL3
2) Digital audio. The Creative cards all do Soundblaster and Soundblaster 16, but not Soundblaster Pro or WSS. Note that they can play SBPro sounds, but stereo will frequently be wrong. The Yamaha card does Soundblaster and Soundblaster Pro, but not Soundblaster 16. It does doe WSS though for 16-bit DOS audio.
3) MIDI. All the cards support MPU-401 (the interface to talk to MIDI devices), but the CT2960 has *bad* bugs in it and all the Creative cards have minor bugs when playing midi and digital audio at the same time. The Yamaha card has bug-free MPU-401. Only the AWE64 cards actually can act as a MIDI playback device.
Basically the AWE64 wins on features, the Yamaha on bug-free fidelity. A solution to get the best of both worlds is to have both installed at the same time. That gives you the real OPL3, SBPro and WSS support of the Yamaha (+bug-free MPU-401 that you're not going to be using without an external module) and the SB16 and AWE (MIDI playback) of the AWE64. Having both means you can avoid the minor bugs in MIDI playback on the AWE by using the Yamaha for digital audio playback when the AWE is doing music. That said, given the questions you are asking, getting those two cards configured properly with non-conflicting resources may be a bit too much of a challenge...
