Now I'm out of time and probably won't. Turns out it's much more complicated than I thought and depends on sound card PCI or ISA or chipset or DSP revision, motherboard chipset, VxD or WDM drivers, IRQ sharing, DMA forwarding, MIDI mapping, SBLink compatibility. When it works perfectly it's transparent, when it doesn't work usually there's nothing you can do to fix it without replacing parts, and there's a whole forum on Vogons dedicated to discussing how to make it work better. Or now you just use DOSBox, set all your games to A220 I5 D1 and don't worry about anything else.
The whole PC compatible industry shifted so quickly away from "legacy" Sound Blaster audio that you would have had completely different experiences with DOS games growing up if your computer was 1 year older or newer. Personally, the first PC I ever had with sound was a 1998 Gateway with an Ensoniq AudioPCI which makes a poor attempt to emulate OPL with its wavetable and that's always going to be how some games are "supposed" to sound for me.