The AWE32 is like a regular SB16 plus a hardware midi synthesizer. Usually, you can use any other MIDI synthesizer to get equivalent sound (there are softsynths that can load SB's soundfonts and should sound mostly like the original).

I know of just one game which used this synthesizer ability to upload a custom SoundFont, DungeonKeeper (at least it claims it does). I was unable to compare sound output if that actually changes anything in the end result.

Final Fantasy 7 is supposed to be able to load custom soundfonts onto AWE cards too, but it's a Windows game.

Ditto for Croc 1.

Are there any games that could benefit from Interwave emulation? Or games simply uses Interwave in GUS mode?

Eradicator or whatever it was that was bundled with my AWE64.

You can load soundfonts manualy with recent windows sound cards. Old nForce2 drivers had such capability ( version 4.xx yes, ver 5.xx no). All Soundblasters PCI too.

If you have a SB Live! or Audigy-class card, the included 4Meg soundfont on the install CD sounds pretty close to the AWE32...

Could someone tell me, these games uses AWE32 for music or SFX playback?
If game uses AWE32 for SFX playback loading soundfonts is useless because game talks to hardware directly. Current emulators can not emulate AWE32, they know only midi and soundfonts will be heard when they are used for midi music only.

Most AWE-32 games (I used to own one) used the AWE-32 for music and the sound blaster 16 portion for sound. The AWE-32 had some general midi emulation ability in DOS, but it didn't work all of the time. Also, games that used the AWE32's EMU chip for sound usually didn't do a good job anyways. I would love to be able to use an AWE32 emulator because it had some really nice instruments.

The AWE-32 itself had samples in a ROM, which makes using the 4 meg soundfont not exactly like using the card by itselt. Not sure if using the 512 GS font would make it authentic or not.

Tie Fighter and Quest For Glory 4 both sounded impressive on the AWE-32 using the standard sample set.

Games that used opl sound effects: tended to sound better on SB16 mode
Music/sound seperated: usually GM emulation/ SB16 hybrid sounded better
OPL music backed by digital sound (example: drums would play on the digital PCM channel like on Battledrome): SB16
AWE32 native: awe32 usually preferred. Some games had the above case sounded better yet allowed you to use the awe32.

"Also, games that used the AWE32's EMU chip for sound usually didn't do a good job anyways"

I had a hard time trying to phrase the above line. You know on some games you'll do something like slash and it'd be rendered through the adlib-like (OPL) synthesizer? Those sometimes sound horrible on GM.

However, I think the AWE32 was designed for game synthesis and on some games, it sounded incredible, even sometimes better than the mt-32. It would be a nice asset to emulate. The AWE32 did have some weird instruments though. The trumpet would sound either incredible or like you are strangling a cat. So, it could sound real horrible on some games but thankfully you can set it as an sb16 when it did.

I don't see any reason to emulate AWE-32 in DOSBox. The sound is the same as SB16, and for the midi there's General Midi support already, which is better.

Who knows? This is an open source program and there might be an inspired AWE32 fanatic out there.

"AWE sounding better than MT-32?"

Methinks you were playing games designed for GM and not for MT32.

There's an AWE32 soundfont floating on the net. You can load it on your card (if it supports soundfonts) to get awe32 instruments.

If I remember correctly some games (as the mentioned dungeon keeper IIRC) used AWE32 soundfonts for sound effects, to have a simple, fast and lightweight way to achieve high sfx poliphony in hardware. So, those games might sound better with AWE32 soundfonts.

Purplet

This is not possible with dosbox. Dosbox cannot upload soundfonts to your soundcard (no way to do it crossplatform) even if it supports soundfonts (and mostly only Creative Labs cards do). The only solution would be to have a software synthesizer which would be hard to make and would use way too much CPU.

Gulikoza, a softsynth is trivial: fluidsynth is available as a library, open source and reads soundblaster soundfont files natively. Way easier to do than mt32, someone would "just" have to handle the relevant IO ports.

But as I said, it remains to be proven that it is actually worth it, i.e. that you gain anything by it. As far as I can tell, the answer is "no", there's nothing you couldn't get by loading the awe32 soundfont into your sound card (or windows' softsynth) and choosing MIDI sound.

That I didn't know 😁

Anyway, why would games use soundfonts for soundeffects? Using digital samples is waay easier. I agree, AWE32 emulation is probably pointless...but setting the necessary IO hooks and forwarding midi data to the host system (so that AWE32 option could be used instead of general midi in the game setup) - similar to SB MIDI interface - might be nice to have. Although I'm not sure if there are games that support AWE32 but not MPU401 interface.

I think Dungeon Keeper did it for performance, like Guest said. But in DOSBox that won't make any difference if it's done via a softsynth, so I see no point. Wasn't AWE32 output just midi stuff? I.e., couldn't you point an AWE32-supporting game at our sb16 with sb-midi enabled (see that patch someone recently did) and have it working?