Like you I never owned a Gravis board back in “the day”, so I was stuck with SB OPL2/3 audio. GUS and the mighty Roland MT-32 were always these mythical devices sitting in the setup.exe of the games I played. Now 20+ years on, thanks to posts like yours and emulation, I can finally hear them in all their glory!

Sadly though, it wasn’t really all that long after GUS launched that the whole CD-ROM craze started. Redbook audio really negated, in a lot of cases, the whole purpose of trackers and wavetable audio. Suddenly it didn’t matter that my Soundblaster midi sounded like gargage, a recording from a much better synth than I could ever afford was streaming through my speakers!

Then obviously DirectX took over making all boards generic DACs, the rise (and fall? Aureal A3D anyone?) of positional audio, culminating with AC’97 codecs on every motherboard more or less killing separate audio boards seemingly overnight. Good times.