You asked for experiences i got some, overall it's fine and personally i haven't many dislikes, what i read here are tidbits from my pov and no important things.
I'm very grateful for the implementation of Munt and Fluidsynth.
Usually i like to blurr it, matter of choice if you stared for decades in a crt you won't like the crispness it gives you to well, neither i like the original low resolution and appreciate the visiual enhancements, personally i see no advantage of an exact 320x200 resolution on a "4k" monitor, useless if you ask me.
Or to set the game to 4:3 aspect ratio just because the rotten crt was 4:3 and couldn't display the original 16:10 res proper.
Matter of choice.
I'm happy to bypass that (even for my emulated amigas) a circle has to be a circle and not an oval just because the shitty crt displayed it oval.
However even i have some dislikes, this is mainly something which has been stated already, i like to capture the sound from the fluidsynth.
It is quite a difference for some games if i convert the midi to a waveform in the "plain way" or if i play them back using the exact drivers from back then.
Recently i fumble around with BARIS and it's a nice example for this, except for the GM versions the midi will only sound right played back in DOSBox using the miles drivers and the for this game very special and heavy used GTL libraries.
External Munt i.e. can't offer you this because it disregards the GTL and the music will sound wrong (probably they could be extracted to a sysex file?).
But also Fluidsynth isn't the same, it has some drawbacks in DOSBox ECE but sounds otherwise better to me (might be i only pretend this).
First i noticed both Munt and your implementation have inversed stereo, if i think right about this it is obvious since the MT is a Synthesizer so if you play for an audience this setup will be proper, left becomes right for the listener.
However i found out "reverse.stereo" has to be true else left becomes right channel if you sit in front of the machine, you are the audience in this case.
The implementation of Fluidsynth has a small drawback, it can't load large soundfonts, "Crisis3" which is 1.6GB won't load at all, while sure i can load it to Fluidsynth itself.
OhKeh no one wants or needs "Crisis3" it isn't worth the size in my opinion.
But i like "Fatboy" very well, in my opinion the best soundfont especially when it comes to classical or jazz music.
Fatboy is about 300MB and already reaches some limit, it loads but can fail to reload if you change the volume of Fluidsynth in DOSBox (i like to create batch playlists from the games midi, perhaps you know this already).
In some sort of way a soundfont can't be big enough and still it won't reach the depth and saturation of a synthesizer, this i experienced with your implementation of Munt it's quite a difference even if it's only emulated.
As you can see music is to me as a short sighted much more of interest as the already blurred view i have, and it won't get better over the decades 😉
However, i would like to capture Fluidsynths output without to use the audio loopback because it will distort the signal a little bit (compare a square wave from Tandy output, captured from within DOSBox them are absolute square waves while using the loopback the signal is blurred).
Further i would like if i can load large soundfonts even if i think 1.6GB "Crisis3" isn't needed at all it should be possible.
At least i like to use Fatboy without any problems (which isn't the case as long as long as you load the soundfont only once and didn't change the volume of Fluidsynth which will be the case if you play a game).
Of course i could use another virtual synth such as "coolsoft" but as i already stated especially for games from the early '90s it won't be the same because it won't reproduce the midi exactly like the games played them back.
But most of all i like that i won't have to care about the soundfont to use or it's volume setting once i elaborated that.
That i can create a batch for a music selection which was hardly possible to have on a real machine.
Some like it exact, some others like to have the most enhancements possible.
Well if you would like the exact sound you would select PC Speaker or AdLib, that was what a common user could afford back then.
I no way you would have had GUS, MT-32, SB, SC all in one machine, but let's make use of that.
If i like the exact display i get a crt and burn out my eyes with it.
Else i use the enhancements.
I mean yes dammit i carried an old Belinea Multisync Monitor on my shoulders at home, just for my rotten Miggy (which is neither of any need, the emulated A4000 runs better as my real one, it is mainly to compare the music output, it seems still the PC can't handle breakbeats proper)
Strangewisely a PC isn't worthy enough for such to me, i never cared for them to much, it's a shitty PC still to me.
Ok enough lamento, i like DOSBox ECE.
Keep it this way, keep the idea of the ease.
It is right to play games, far enough.
Playback a PC demo on a dedicated machine which no one had except the one who created the demo?
Not very useful from my pov.
Respect one certain game and risk that the rest won't run well?
In no way.
A friend of mine, to tell it right the recent dev. of "FFED3D" suggested to me once DOSBox-X, he prefers it but i think it's just overloaded, it is a monster to handle and certainly no thing you will need just to play a game.
Nothing, really no advantage to play games over vanilla DOSBox or ECE.
