After visiting my parents house few months ago and uncovering my stash of Sierra PC games from my childhood, I've jumped further down the rabbit's hole and purchased a Roland MT-32 and am looking for a SC-55.
Awesome to hear, man! You'll enjoy it. 😀 If you're interested in chatting about the games and their music, you're welcome to visit my Facebook group (if you're on FB), "Sierra Music and Memories".
Some of the later Sierra games came in both 3.5" floppies and CD versions. Does it matter which version I get if I want the best compatibility with the MT-32 or SC-55? What about those Sierra complete collection series on the CDs? Would they still work with the MT-32 and SC-55 or is it better to purchase the games individually?
Sierra game releases have nothing to do with which device they were composed for (i.e. a CD version isn't composed for a different device as a result of being on CD), so you don't have to worry about that. Many CD versions do have both MT-32 and General MIDI support, so it's good to know which games were composed for which.
The general rule is that you want to play games with the device they were composed for, even though a few MT-32 games have GM support and all GM games have MT-32 support (relatively speaking).
Sierra supported the MT-32 for composition until somewhere in 1992.
The last games to use native MT-32 scores were:
- QFG1VGA
- PQ1VGA
- LB2: Dagger
The first to use SC-55 were:
- QFG3
- KQ6
As for collections and stuff, it depends. If you don't know your way around DOSBox, use installers and bundled versions, but edit the resource.cfg file in your game folder to change a line to "sounddrv = MT32.DRV" from whatever .DRV it had before.
Otherwise, I would recommend purchasing or using individual games, modern releases of Sierra bundled collections aren't offering you anything extra, although I haven't bought the latest GoG or Steam releases for a while now.
