You know, I was trying to find a video of what adlib/sound blaster music sounded like on the GUS (edit: like a while ago, I concur with the video description), and there was almost nothing about it on youtube, and now here it appears in my recommended! Much kudos
My brother had a Gravis UltraSound Classic back in the day, while it was cool for MIDI and a handful of demos with native GUS support (2nd Reality and Hocus Pocus!), it was such a kludge of a card to getting working for literally anything. SBOS was laughable compared to a real OPL3, it was more like a total reinterpretation of the in-game music than an actual FM synth emulator. Really felt like an unstable prototype sound card than something ready for the market. When I got my own 486 in the late 90's, I acquired his GUS but almost immediately replaced it with a Pro Audio Spectrum 16 + Roland SCC-1 and never looked back. I do still have that GUS card today! On an interesting note, the GF1 sound chip is based on the Ensoniq 5506, which itself is based on the earlier Ensoniq 5503 that was built-in every Apple IIGS computer, all the way back in 1986! Sure the 5503 was 8-bit resolution and only came with 64K of sound RAM, but it gave a taste of wavetable synthesis back in the 80's. Just like the GUS, it had 32 voices too, pretty cool back then!
And it doesn't work with protected mode games (anything using dos4gw for example), so it's of somewhat limited usefulness. It's "better than nothing", and for somebody who only had a GUS back in the day, it would definitely be a workaround to get sound in some games that doesn't have native support. Some games could be patched to add support as well. But today, a much better solution is to simply run a GUS side-by-side with an SB Pro or SB 16 or something similar. That's what I do in my 486.
