The MIDI emulation TSR is only supposed to work properly with real-mode games, any protected mode games are probably not going to work unless they have native AWE support.

Protected mode games are usually the games I can get to work with either GM or standard SB music. It's mainly the older games that are giving me a headache. A lot of old Sierra adventure games either crash, or give me a "unable to initialize sound hardware" error, upon which some of them will still run with sound (just not gm) or without sound at all. I am still running through a list of games to try, but up until now the results are all over the place.

Could that be related to CPU speed sensitivity issues? You could try slowing your PC down and seeing wether this helps getting the games to run with sound or at all.

My experience with an AWE64 Value was - if you want to use it for General MIDI in DOS games, you're better off doing that from within Windows 9x.

Creative's Windows drivers are much more stable, and I didn't find a single game that couldn't use the AWE as a General MIDI device while running under the Win9x DOS prompt.