Does BASSMIDI and VirtualMIDISynth work under Windows 98 SE?

I still find 3 sound cards quite extensive 😊

I would likely ditch the Live! and use external MT-32 and GM synths, or hook up a MIDI notebook running Munt and BASSMIDI / VirtualMIDISynth.

I might do a project showcasing all my ideas into a single build or something like that.

This box, whenever I get finished, will only have limited room and will probably have to be moved out of the way fairly often. The only external connections will be mouse, keyboard, Ethernet, power, monitor and a single audio output. All the sounds cards will be connected internally. I guess it depends on how you look at it but this seems simpler to me, at least for my situation and the amount of room I have to work with. These three sound cards are inexpensive, available, sound good and play nice together (no throwing stuff, slamming stuff or cursing were involved in setting them up. Just pop the three cards in, load the SBL first so it doesn't overwrite the Vortex2's A3D.dll, load the other two cards and it works. Easy as pie. I actually ended up putting these three sound cards together because it was the path of least resistance, there was no forcing it to work and it covers everything I need in this box. MT-32 would be nice but I don't think I could play any of those games on this one anyways.

I doubt BASSMIDI would run in 98, I might try soon, and I doubt this box is powerful enough. Now my Ultimate 98 Box CPU power would not be an issue. That might be an interesting project when I get back to it. I ran DOSBox on it inside of Windows 98 and it was fast enough to play DOS Quake at 800x600 smoothly, pretty impressive to me. If that motherboard had 6 PCI slots it could really be an all-in-one piece of awesomeness. Once you throw in a FX5900 you only have access to 2 PCI slots. I was thinking about a Yamaha YMF724 combined with a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz for that one. I could dual boot with XP and then use DOSBox with BASSMIDI, MUNT and VirtualMIDISynth. It would be nice if DOSBox's official build had OPL3 passthrough for such a system.

Well Phil, after writing all of this I realized that I wasn't clear on which 98 box I was talking about for this sound setup. This is for my P3 850 box so I definitely won't be playing old DOS games on it. My AMD K6-2+ box similar to yours, well actually right now it is identical to yours, is on the back burner at the moment. It will primarily be used for old DOS games.

I had a little more time today and I can say for sure this is what is going in the final build. I have never played with SoundFonts before but I like this a lot for when I'm not in the mood for straight up OPL3 and want some good sounding MIDI. I am of course a MIDI novice but damn this sounds good to me!

I'm new to sound fonts too but think they're great - even the 4MB one that comes with the AWE64 Gold CD rocks IMHO. The value of my external SC-55 - with the wires and the desk-space-using and the large bloody power pack - has diminished significantly now that I have my Goldfinch and my sound fonts.