'90s sound card bullshit

I have paid more attention to sound cards, sound card drivers, and sound card options in DOS games in the past week than I have in the entire rest of my life put together.

It all started with trying to get a clean, original, un-fucked-with copy of MTG "Shandalar" to work on modern computers. First, I tried virtual machines, only to learn that Shandalar is one of those games where events happen as fast as your CPU can do the math, so trying to walk in any direction results in your character going to Ludicrous Speed until they slam into a town 0.1 seconds later.

So then I tried playing with PCem. And I succeeded in getting Shandalar working on a Win95 machine in PCem. And then I remembered that I have a lot of other games that don't run too well on new hardware and software. And that's when mission creep set in.

Monkey Island was when I really started to realize that the sound card was kinda important. It doesn't support the Sound Blaster. It only supports the Game Blaster, Tandy, Roland, Adlib, and internal speaker, and even though the Sound Blaster is supposed to be Adlib-compatible, you can't fool Monkey Island into thinking that your Sound Blaster is an Adlib. So I had to go and learn the histories of all these different sound cards and what chips were in them and what was backward-compatible with what, and now I know that Doom produces better music when you set it to General MIDI than when you set it to Adlib or Sound Blaster, and the Ensoniq is backward-compatible with the original Sound Blaster but not with the AWE32, and the reason why there isn't an option for the SB Pro or 16 in this menu is because the Pro v1 used the same MIDI chip as the original Sound Blaster while the Pro v2 and 16 used the same MIDI chip as the AWE32. And the reason why the Adlib and the Sound Blaster are different options in the music menu despite using the same MIDI chip is because fuck you.

I did not want this knowledge. This is cursed, ancient knowledge.