I enjoy playing really old video games on my PC, particularly games that I run in DOSBox, a DOS emulator that allows you to run those old games on a new computer. A while back, I was playing DOS games on a Mac through DOSBox, and I found something interesting. If I set an old video game, such as X-Wing, to play its MIDI audio using General MIDI, it would use the GM Soundfont from my Mac, which is obviously considerably higher quality than what the old DOS computers could manage back in the day. The old MIDI music came to life in amazing quality and really breathed new life into a lot of games that I used to play. However, I am no longer on a Mac, I'm on Vista 64 bit. Windows' MIDI support is not nearly as impressive as Mac's, and using General MIDI on Vista just makes it sound terrible. I did a bit of research and I found out that this is mainly due to the fact that Microsoft is still using obsolete Frequency Modulation for its MIDI, while Mac is set up to use higher quality "Wavetable" MIDI. I asked around a bit and found out that I would need a new soundcard in order to support higher quality MIDI. I would also need a Creative/Soundblaster brand card and use special software from Creative in order to load new MIDI soundfonts. The question is, what kind of card do I need to get? Creative's online store was less than informative with regards to the admittedly niche feature-set I'm looking for. All I know is that it needs to support Wavetable MIDI and allow me to load new GM soundfonts. I'm not a huge audiophile, but I'm a musician and so having a new soundcard would probably help me there too. I play around with MIDI a lot, though, so getting better MIDI support is much more important to me than creating a slightly better overall audio quality. Looking to spend under $100 if possible, but I suppose I'm willing to go higher if there's no other way. Also, if there is a way for me to achieve these things without purchasing new hardware, I'd be interested to know that as well, but I don't think it's possible. Thanks!
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