You might also want to consider the capabilities, and limitations, of the AdLib/Sound Blaster cards, and more importantly, just how those cards are emulated by current-day cards.
Here are several videos by 8-Bit Guy on the subject of sound synthesis, how it worked in older systems, and how it differs from current sound adapters.
The main thing you will notice is that these systems were mainly
synthesizers, not
samplers. PCM sampling, which is used by (or superseded in) pretty much every sound card made after 1994, works in a radically different fashion from a synthesizer; a synth
generates a waveform, while a sampler
plays back a recorded waveform.
Note that this means that a card which is purely based on the Yamaha chip that the older sound cards used
could not play back voice or other sampled material. Most games of the time (1987-1993), if they had voice at all (almost none did) were distributed on hybrid Data/Audio CD-ROM, and used the existing capabilities of the CD-ROM drive to run the sampled sounds, but by 1994 cards with samplers started to force that approach out.
Most sound cards between 1994 and 2004 had both a synth and a sampler, but as recorded music playback on computers became more and more important in general, games stopped using the synthesizers and eventually even dropped PCM in its original form in favor of general-purpose compressed digital recording formats such as MP3 and HVEC. Synthesis did linger for other uses for some time, as the new cards started using more complex
wavetable synthesizers around then, but the ubiquity of MP3 made it something of an afterthought by 2004 or so. AFAICT, most sound subsystems after that just emulated the synthesis using samples.
I am not an expert at all of this, so there is a good chance I have misunderstood several key aspects of this. Any corrections would be greatly appreciated. Still, the point I am making - that the 'standard' Sound Blaster was nothing of the sort, nor did it have the capabilities you seem to think it did - stands, I think.