Since I discovered the Yamaha S-YXG50 VSTi plugin run through mudlord's VSTi MIDI driver, I use nothing else for any game that uses MIDI (also Doom, for example). I actually stopped using soundfonts in favor of actual software emulation. That's a thick dense forest you're trying to look for answer through. Then there's the subjective matter of which devices people think a game soundtrack sounds best on regardless of what the composer used, sometimes with a majority opinion. But that would be one comprehensive list to get the actual results from for every game. The composer for Heretic, in contrast to Doom, did not use a Sound Canvas but another device that I.can't recall right now.īasically, Sound Canvas is usually a safe bet. In some cases it was a GUS and even more rarely some obscure device that even less people had. For games older than 1992 or so it was the MT-32. Most of the time it was a Sound Canvas of some kind (SC-55, SC-88, SCC-1, etc).
Sometimes those devices aren't supported by the games themselves, but only rarely. Which one sounds best? IMO, whichever one the composer composed with while scoring it. As for what specified MIDI devices game scores were made for, the answer is all of the ones that the game supports, or it wouldn't support them.
