Ok, I finally found out that the trick I needed to get games using the miles soundsystem to accept gravis was to run loadpats before the game (well, that and to switch it from port 240 to 220 since for some reason the drivers won't accept that a GUS might exist on anything else but 220.) Problem is, though I have what, as nearly as I can see is an ordinary patches.ini file, it's loading 0 patches. So while I get the game to finally use gravis ultrasound for midi, it's now silence. HOWEVER, for just a short period (one session only) it actually worked. I have yet to figure out what could possibly have been different between those sessions.

Part of the trouble here is that while I have used GM, GS, and XG over the years through many various cards, I have never actually owned a Gravis Ultrasound. Now, most of my experience working with other soundcards still applies largely, so I know most of what I'm doing, but, I can't see why it's loading 0 patches when the patches.ini file is obviously not empty and the patches folder does exist with plenty of patch files inside it.

Oh, and I should probably add that there are a few things which do still work. For example, Tyrian2000 kind of works, though it now frequently freezes DOSBox while using GUS emulation (seems like sometime before I tried it and it actually worked without freezing or crashing or anything, so I'm not quite sure what the culprit is.) Then again, Tyrian2k probably doesn't have the greatest programming ever (the setup will frequently crash a system even just using plain old SB16 + MPU401 GM... In particular, the jukebox section is just plain dangerous.)

Does anyone know more about how a GUS works who can figure out what's going on and why it was able to work one session but not another with no obvious changes between the two? I really want to get GUS working because, in theory at least, the early DLS support means that the games that TRULY utilize a GUS the way it's supposed to be used will give you what XG attempted to accomplish in that you will hear what the author intended you to hear exactly.

EDIT: I completely deleted the ultrasnd folder and reinstalled from the original installer (gus411[a-f].zip) but it didn't seem to fix anything. In fact, apparently I must have overwritten the patches at some point or something because now it sounds a lot worse (I'm wondering if this is why I saw someone suggesting that GUS emulation shouldn't interpolate?) In particular I noticed that the Ultrasound MIDI demo (MIDIDEMO.BAT in the installed ultrasnd folder) sounds HORRIBLE with a lot of crackling static and such as if it were playing an old 8-bit sound file or something. Even games sound less than great though with a much lesser amount of this sort of thing going on in games like Tyrian2K (definitely makes me think of maybe some samples that didn't interpolate correctly or something?)

EDIT2: Tried installing the Pro Patches Lite samples. Still nothing. 0 patches loaded and absolute silence in games like Daggerfall or Anvil of Dawn when I use GUS. Playmidi still sounds like it's trying to play static and a MIDI at the same time (lol, I guess what would happen if you piped the MIDI data through both the DSP and the actual MIDI section of the soundcard.) I might add that I used the -video option so that it doesn't show anything on the screen (no high resolution, and no instrument visualization.) I doubt a San Diego at 2.4GHz is completely insufficient to manage GUS emulation of a MIDI file. I tried setting cycles down to 6000 (my usual being 15000 which seems to run smoothest in the most games for me) and then down to 2500 with both dynamic and normal cores. Perhaps the playmidi bug is unrelated though. If I can just get GUS patches to work for games like Daggerfall, I'd be happy, though I would like to know why games like Tyrian2k still sound like some samples still are rather less than optimal (it's hard to describe, it's like just the sample has the static, and even then not very much, so other instruments sound fine.)