Please show the results of your tests. Also, this forum is for dosbox questions, not advice on Windows sound cards.

My ears. Namely, I still have access to an old system with a SB16.

Ok if this is not a dosbox question, feel free to move this to the appropriate subforum. Or I will delete and recreate if directed to the appropriate subforum. Thanks.

1. the soundcard doesn't matter - emulation might not be what you expect (did you try all settings and made sure the right soundcard was selected for emulation?) but whatever soundcard you have, it's just being used for playback. A real SB16 certainly won't help (though there is a patch that would pass through the OPL to the real card instead of emulating it, but I think it's not been integrated and might be linux only.
2. you cannot achieve MT32 accuracy with a soundfont - you will either need a real device hooked up or another emulator (munt).
3. GM will probably not sound like the original as well, as it is dependend on the soundfont and thus vary - but more accuracy with the right soundfont can probably be achieved 😉

4. topic is alright here, IMO

Thanks Dominus. I'll play around with the settings more. It sounds like MUNT + tweaking SB16 emulation in Dosbox may be my best bet.

If you or anyone has any recommendations in how to achieve the most accurate SB16 + MT32/GM reproduction using Dosbox, I'm all ears. I'm willing to buy hardware if I need to (SoundFont card). I'm seeing if I can't get satisfactory results without having to piece together a real MT32 + SB, even if I buy newer hardware which is not a MT32 or SB, but makes Dosbox sound better.

• I'm not clear there should be significant difference in digital sound played from an old SB16 vs a modern system for things emulated by DOSBox. This is presuming speaker setups and a few other details are similar.
• I presume, for General Midi, just about any modern audio device will do. You should be able to load CoolSoft’s VirtualMIDISynth if you want to load up alternate soundfonts to more closely match certain soundcards or generally improve playback. Though, and perhaps I'm just confused on this, I was of the impression that GM allowed games to load up their own samples, so in some cases it shouldn't matter what Soundfont is loaded.
• As referenced by Dominus, out of the box DOSBox is unable to reproduce MT32 sound properly. It can be appropriately reproduced with MUNT, or with patches present in DAUM DOSBox (and other custom builds), which integrate MUNT into DOSBox. Getting things working will require extracting ROMs from a MT32 device (or finding them though other sources). If you just want MT32 support for games, I'd go with one of the builds with MUNT integrated in rather than running it separately.

I'd actually go with seperate Munt rather than integrated in Dosbox one because
1. there is no support for those builds and ykhwong who does the daum stuff has gone hiding
2. it's useful for other setups, for example ScummVM
3. the munt gui gives you the sysex messages which looks great 😉

Here is an example of what I'm talking about with the SB/Adlib emulation being off https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hPVwjZ6bNM

I may record my own demos of one of my favorite games (QFG) and put up a Youtube demonstrating the difference that I've found. But I'm currently far from my original SB16 hardware to do so. This has bugged me for a long time. I only had the SB16, and AWE32 IIRC. I believe the SB16 and AWE32 both had a SB Pro emulation mode in the driver.

That youtube sample is from OPL3 emulation, not OPL2. That is not evidence that dosbox's default SB emulation is "off". Moreover, Codeholio has further enhanced the accuracy of dosbox sound emulation and provided extensive testing against real hardware.

OPL2 = OPL3?

Why would OPL3 emulation be invalid for a comparison? No need to be defensive. I'm a programmer myself and have considered volunteering to dig into this issue and contribute to fix anything that may be off in the emulation. I won't be able to do it soon, but I'll be doing my own tests against real hardware. Perhaps Dosbox since these changes, does come very close to a real SB16/Adlib, but I'll verify because I'm incredibly picky about my DOS games.

Interesting quote-
"And DosBox OPL emulation did get a lot better with DosBox 0.73 (2009-05-27).
Yes it doesn’t sound like like real hardware. But its not that much off.
Especially since you did get a much clearer Sound. Because everything before the SB Live, Sound Blaster cards are noisy as hell.

If you want to see bad emulation look at all MT-32 Emulation attempts.
It’s not important if you use Munt (DosBox with MT-32 EMU or ScummVM or the WinDriver) or a MT-32 Soundfont.
It’s horrible."
http://devtidbits.com/2008/04/26/dosbox-sound-emulation/

¡BuckRogers! wrote:

Interesting quote- "And DosBox OPL emulation did get a lot better with DosBox 0.73 (2009-05-27). Yes it doesn’t sound like like […]
Show full quote

Interesting quote-
"And DosBox OPL emulation did get a lot better with DosBox 0.73 (2009-05-27).
Yes it doesn’t sound like like real hardware. But its not that much off.
Especially since you did get a much clearer Sound. Because everything before the SB Live, Sound Blaster cards are noisy as hell.

If you want to see bad emulation look at all MT-32 Emulation attempts.
It’s not important if you use Munt (DosBox with MT-32 EMU or ScummVM or the WinDriver) or a MT-32 Soundfont.
It’s horrible."
http://devtidbits.com/2008/04/26/dosbox-sound-emulation/

Interesting response (2 posts later):
"A lot has happened in the meantime, and at least now, emulation has reached a very good level. OPL-2 and OPL-3 synthesis in DOSBox sounds pretty authentic, it has instantly taken me back, even when directly comparing against original recordings. MT-32 is a tough nut to crack, but Munt has made a lot of progress as well."

I saw that, but I'm going to be doing my own testing. I'm sure it varies per game. I'm an expert on how the QFG series is supposed to sound. I'm less interested in MT32, as I didn't have one of these in the 80s and I don't play dos games to be wowed by the music. It's more the nostalgia. SB16 was an awesome card, I'm mostly concerned with properly emulated OPL3 / SB16.

Another thing I'd like to compare is dosbox to ScummVM. I'll add that to my list and report back.