ZDoom

Kotti wrote: One question: Seeing that both the GUS and WildMidi options are merely inferior variations of this, will they stay or be removed? And what about FluidSynth? It's different enough to not throw it in the same basket but on the other hand it is different in not particularly good ways, of the available MIDI synths it is by far the worst sounding, often even being outclassed by OPL.

No, why should they? It's not that they significantly complicate matters. Regarding FluidSynth I have to agree about the quality,. It is indeed vastly inferior to the other synths when the same soundfonts are being used and I have no idea why it sounds so bad. But after all that is merely subjective so let's keep all the options. There may be people who like them.

I am going to have to agree with Graf on this one.

If people *really* did not like inferior synths (hardware, software, or otherwise) - no one would go for the OPL option in DOSBox or GZDoom. Yet, it's what sounds most nostalgic, evoking memories of crappy cheap-ass FM synths on our quite popular at the time and wide-spread Sound Blaster cards, even if that era only lasted about a decade or so, and the same thing could easily happen with FluidSynth. Besides, there's nothing stopping a person from creating a FluidSynth-compatible library to drop in its place, since it's a .dll anyway.

If OPL actually sounded like those old cards I wouldn't dislike it so much. But it somehow manages to bring out the worst parts of that ancient sound. I still got a CD which I recorded in 1995, playing the music through Doom.exe and my sound card of that time. This sounds a lot better than the digital OPL synths. In this case the analogue circuits really help smoothing out the sound so that it's less harsh. (That CD was recorded by piping it through my stereo amplifier and doing the recording on a different computer because it was not possible to record on the playing system. Bad old times... )

Obviously it's no match to the high quality Oggs I use these days for Doom's original music.

I might as well use Timidity++ for Roland SC-55 soundfonts. It sounds original for Doom music.
Because Doom Music was done on an Roland SC-55.