I'm sure I'm not the only person on this forum who enjoys old games. And anyone who's played games from the late 80s and early 90s, particularly Sierra games, is probably aware of a piece of hardware called the Roland MT-32. And since a couple of days ago,
I own one! 
The MT-32 was released in 1987, and in 1988 Sierra's King's Quest 4 was the first PC game to support the MT-32. It quickly became the de-facto standard for music in games of that era. Unfortunately, most people (myself included) were stuck with AdLib or Sound Blaster cards because the MT-32 was damned expensive, with prices around $600 (not adjusted for inflation), compared to under $100 for a Sound Blaster.
Ever since then I've wanted to own one of these things. In recent years, I've tried using emulators but they don't approach the sound of the real thing, and the most popular one (Munt) requires the original MT-32 control ROM, which is illegal to distribute so rather hard to get, and in spite of using those ROMs, it still doesn't really sound like a real MT-32. It's close, but no cigar. Plus, Munt is a 32 bit WDM driver that only works on XP, which is annoying.
There are a couple of sound cards that claim "MT-32 compatibility" but most of them are outdated by now as well, and none of them really come close (most use wavetable synthesis to emulate it, which isn't up to it). Of course there's the Roland LAPC-I (which is essentially an MT-32 built into a sound card) but it's an ISA card so no real chance of getting that to work on a modern PC.
Fed up with this, I've finally just given in and bought a real MT-32. I found one in excellent condition (honestly, it looks as good as new, not bad for a 20 year old piece of equipment) for around $30 on Yahoo Auction (eBay doesn't operate in Japan). Getting it to work on Windows 7 x64 was pretty easy as well. All I needed was a USB MIDI cable, an audio cable to connect the MT-32's output to my sound card's line-in, and it works perfectly in DOSBox.
I've made a short video demonstrating just how awesome the MT-32 really is compared to its contemporary rivals (AdLib and Sound Blaster). As you can see (hear), there really is no comparison.
This thing really is awesome.
