when i used a dos image i seemingly lost all gus support!

Depends on how you checked whether it works, could be as simple as
you forgot to set the GUS environment variables.

I was trying to install the drivers - possibly not the best solution i know - but basically it said it couldn't find the gus at all (which i believe it can do in plain dosbox)

Sorry, but this thread and its resurrection subject seem awfully pointless to me. Why don't you just use DOSBox MIDI support? It will sound better than GUS MIDI ever can, because you can use high-quality Soundfonts instead of the relatively low-fi GUS samples. The GUS is not "better" than a emulated Soundblaster/GM combo, it just had a small number of advantages over SB's, which were not too useful for "normal" users though (like for example the ability to playback and record digital sounds at the same time IIRC). I had two Ultrasound cards back in the DOS days, and what I remember about those little emulation and compatibility TSR's is lots and lots of trouble - incompatibilites, crashes, low memory, etc. . Running these tools in emulation is not likely to make this work any better. Just forget it and use SB/GM like everyone else, and invest the time you've saved into playing some nice classics (; .

The OP wanted to use MegaEm because his machine was too slow for DOSBox' MIDI support. I guess he must have been using a pocket calculator or something. A decently modern machine should have no troubles with the MIDI emulation at all, though the host CPU is definitely _the_ limiting factor when it comes to DOSBox. On my slow-ish C2D notebook running DOSBox and Timidity, MIDI emulation CPU usage doesn't even visibly register with the Windows task monitor.

maybe so, but megaem provides an alternative emulation of the mt32 - maybe not as good as the real thing, but better than some, and it does so with less stutter (at least on my system) than gulikoza's build of dosbox .73 with munt integrated.

I was trying to install the drivers - possibly not the best solution i know - but basically it said it couldn't find the gus at all (which i believe it can do in plain dosbox)

Think that's what other people did as well (and succeeded?), maybe you can
dig up some old thread about that.
You could try core=normal and different cycle counts, maybe that helps.