All I know is I went from a Sound Blaster 16 Pro to an AWE 64 gold, the MIDI quality blew my mind. I believe this is the result of using instrument samples to render the audio instead of pure synthesis.

I also remember that the SB and other audio cards added MIDI lines into the DA-15 joystick port that for some reason resided on sound cards. This let people hook up real synths to render the music and I knew of one musician who did this with a keyboard though I never got to hear it live.

Yep. Count me in as another fan of the AWE64 Gold. The DSP chip they used on that board, version 4.16, also patched the MIDI hanging note bug that was present since the SB16 era. As an aside, I believe the very earliest SB16s didn't have this hanging note bug, but they were incredibly noisy.

> joystick port that for some reason resided on sound cards.

That reason was the limited amount of ISA ports. Early joystick ports were on their own ISA card. Which used a precious slot. For creative labs it was good advertising "see, no extra slot needed"

Sound fonts were a reovlution on consumer grade PCs. I can still hear the "Bloodwar" demo they shipped with.

But I also recall how much I struggled to get the emu10k1 chip to work with my Linux distro in the (very) early 2000s. I eventually gave up.

Some keyboards of the time period even came with a special "general midi mode" specifically for this, i recall the ensoniq TS12 I used at the time did