TBH if you care about the music a lot, the Amiga,C64 and FMTowns versions of the early games like maniac,zak,loom are something to look into.
I got my first PC in ~1992 and that's around when PC music had all kinds of options. (my PC ended having 3 sound cards by '96*)
Windows, 3D and CD's brought so much change that some developers of the day said they had to throw away everything often and the "improvements" if you ask me were kinda like LCD TV with 3D glasses vs OLED TV and no 3D... Gimmicks vs quality. I think Q1 looks better without all the filtering done by majority of 3D cards - the filtering just destroys detail and makes for dull plastic look in all games. I don't recall shimmering of the excess detail being an issue every with software rendering & CRT's. Not having cleartype & 3d filtering would immediately reveal how crap LCD's really are vs CRT (eg.imo rectangular pixel boundaries aren't "sharpness" but a defect - now 270+DPI is attempt to fix that defect but much harder to drive and require more input detail for same perceived effect due to the forgiving nature of say crt tv with low res content vs lcd - if the detail is there, then LCD does look better detail wise but that also means you need more time in production to produce all the fine detail).
*in theory SB16 & GUS and even PAS should sound about the same (for digital sample play) if you go by specs but having bought back those cards and just testing them, they sound all completely different for both digital and music. But this is the kind of thing that some people just don't notice and I think it tells that there is probably some genetics in play - some people don't get any feeling from music while I get very intense feelings - so I have desire for quality in the audio quality and that music itself, where quality is defined by what I feel as most satisfying experience, not by any scientific metric. In music, what is satisfying is not equal to what is mathematically perfect (personal thing, I think there's modern musicians that compose based on theory instead of feeling). I came across a paper where the authors were surprised that brains react to ultrasounds over 50 Khz as measured by EEG. So to people used to hearing live music, they are not (as) satisfied with recordings as recordings miss that thing in the 50+ Khz that they have been accustomed to.
So what personally is going on I believe is that I was accustomed to certain kind of sound card audio signature and due to effects of "nostalgy" etc, I prefer that type of signature. I am investigating if it's possible to reproduce the same effect on other cards with some EQ for example.
