Odd video. He speaks quite well about various other cards, but then bundles all "MIDI cards" together. In my opinion it is very important to speak about Roland LA synthesizers (MT-32/LAPC-1/CM-32L etc.), and General MIDI cards, separately. I'm unsure what he meant by there being little consistency with MIDI cards before General MIDI. Well, yeah, for MIDI musicians yes, but for classic PC gaming, it is quite straightforward:

- Early "MIDI games" supported Roland MT-32/LAPC-1/CM-32L
- Later "MIDI games" supported General MIDI/Sound Canvas/SCC-1

Like he mentioned, DOSBox just sends the MIDI messages from the game to the OS (Windows), and it is up to that to decide what to do with them. DOSBox doesn't have any internal General MIDI software synthesizer, and it doesn't need to.

By default those MIDI messages are intercepted by the Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth which is a fully General MIDI compliant "virtual GM soundcard" in all current PC Windowses. It gets the job done for games with General MIDI (or Sound Canvas/SCC-1) support, but General MIDI music can be improved further quite a bit by using freeware soundfont utilities and soundfonts (e.g. CoolSoft VirtualMIDISynth with the Chorium Rev A soundfont). So General MIDI games work fine with DOSBox (at least in Windows, no idea about Android DOSBox etc.), you just need to run the game setup to use General MIDI for music. No changes needed to DOSBox setup necessarily.

I feel it is mostly irrelevant that General MIDI music may sound somewhat different depending what GM soundcard or soundfont you use. It still tends to sound much better than e.g. Adlib/Soundblaster music even on basic GM soundcards, and as long as the sound card or soundfont is SCC-1 compliant, you'll get good music as most General MIDI music in PC games seemed to be made specifically with SCC-1 in mind. But that music still sounds pretty good on e.g. Waveblaster or other GM cards.

Roland LA synths were kind of predecessors to the General MIDI cards. By default they don't work right with basic DOSBox as you need the Roland MT-32 or CM-32L ROMs, and either Munt emulator, or a special DOSBox build with built-in Munt emulator support. But it is well worth it to pursue MT-32 support in games that supported it (unless there is also General MIDI support, that is usually better in those few games that supported both).

I had also Gravis Ultrasound, but there were only a handful of games that really supported it properly (as a digital mixer playing tracker type "MOD" music, like a glorified Commodore Amiga). Most games that listed GUS support just used it as a generic General MIDI card for music, meaning you'd get just as good or even better music by just selecting General MIDI option instead.

That quasi-GUS support also had some issues sometimes, e.g. I recall at least originally in Doom and Doom 2 the music tempo would change according to what was happening on the screen when using GUS, while with the General MIDI option (using a proper General MIDI card with real MPU-401, like Roland SCC-1), the sound tempo remained constant as it should.

Hence, I feel Gravis Ultrasound support is mostly irrelevant, except for those few games with proper GUS support.

That's incredibly informative. Thanks.
I guess I'll try out the General MIDI support for more games from now on.

Indeed, VirtualMIDISynth in the bomb. In the old days I actually purchased a sound blaster audigy just to get decent MIDI through soundfonts (remember the gaming edition with deus ex GOTY?), and was blown away by something like the Chaos soundfont at the time. Ahhh, good old dos midi days - the installation music was good.

And, I don't know, I just like daggerfall the best. I think Morrowind and on were good, but they tried a little too hard to appeal to the kind of imaginary masses with the sequels IMHO. Pixalized naked witches, books (holy cow daggerfall had a LOT of books) about... stuff..., argonians that can actually breathe underwater (that was probably a bit OP), an almost unlimited amount of towns to visit, and flying, flying everywhere.

Thanks for the informative thread!