Current Features

What it can do:

Output either the raw real-time midi stream, or a complete SMF (standard midi file) that can be played using any midi player, like Windows' Media Player, or TiMidity (a real time Midi-Wave converter).
It supports online patch translation, if the patch banks expected by the software don't match those of the actual output device. This will probably be the case if the software thinks you're using an MT/32 device while what you really have is a GM compatible sound card. Those two are in fact quite similiar, but many songs will still sound different. By using the supplied sb16ctrl program, you can tell the driver to translate the MT/32 patch set to the general midi set.
In most cases, digital sound works. Although you need a pretty fast machine to get real time audio, even with slower machines it is reasonably good, but you may get some looping or echoes. Currently output is supported for Linux (and possibly other Unixes) and Windows.
The digital output can also be redirected to a VOC file, which is a file format defined by Creative Labs. From this it can then be coverted to, for example, a WAV file. sox can do this. Note that the sound will be exactly the same, so saving to a file is not going to get rid of the loops.

Patch translation

To use the online patch translation, you just run the sb16ctrl program (found in the sub-directory misc/sb16) within the emulator. This program will expect a translation file as parameter, so that the translation can vary depending on the software being used. Especially if the program tries to upload some patches to an MT/32, this will be necessary.
The translation file is a standard text file, for the format please look at the example file. To get a list of the patches your program expects, please run it with the SB16-loglevel set to 1. This will show all program and bank changes.
Another thing the sb16ctrl program can do is show you some internal settings of the SB16 emulation. Just give it an integer as parameter and you should see some information. This is not really useful, but at least you can find out if the emulation is working.
And it can send any arbitrary midi message to the output device if you like.

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Planned Features

Adding OPL3 FM emulation. The framework is already there, but nothing really works yet. When it's done, the FM music will be translated to midi messages
On Windows: making the output devices selectable, not just using the midi and wave mappers

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Not-So-Planned Features

What I probably won't include in the emulation is the "intelligent" mode of the MPU401 part, which is useful only in recording midi data from sources attached to the midi port on the SB16. Since this can easily be done with existing software, I don't think it will be necessary to add this.

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