Slightly tangential:
I've been wishing for years that a cottage industry would form around building quality systems for playing old games. Maybe a 486 100mhz with 16mb of RAM, or a Pentium 133 with 32mb and a decent video card so Quake would run well (Diamond Monster 3D 2 maybe?). Proper Soundblaster, 3.5 and 5.25in floppies, 4x CDROM, and a correctly configured autoexec.bat and config.sys. Hell, an external 28.8 or 56k modem too.
Dosbox and the like are great, but the sound is never right. Soundblaster 16/Pro/etc had a very distinct sound that none of the emulated stuff even approaches. Miss it mostly when playing Doom/Doom 2. The music is never right.
The OPL2 and 3 chips were all-digital, so it's possible to verify that the bitstreams from the original chips matches the outputs of an emulator of the chip...but the original hardware also included some specific ADCs with some kind of buffer feedback loop, and I think that's where the real difference in the sound comes in (like the overly-harsh drum sounds from most of the emulators).
I'm working on a side-project right now to build a USB-connected YMF262+YAC512 board for the reasons you've mentioned. I've actually got a 600MHz K6-3 with 128MB of RAM, Geforce4 ti4400 and SB16 that I use as a retro computer, but if I can have the same, proper audio output on my regular machines, that would be even better.
Relying on ancient hardware is not a good idea for the long term: it'll eventually fail.
It should be possible to revive some of this old hardware and characterize the sound, using specific inputs and recording the outputs, and creating a filter which can then be included in emulators to recreate the original sound.
FYI, the journal this post is from is a seasoned group of coders & librarians. It's annual and regional conferences always include hands-on programming workshops that I've found useful as a medical and web librarian. Love the multidisciplinary community of Code4Lib. The Open Paren podcast is close to this community (http://openparen.club).
Seems weird they only tangentially mention archive.org in a reference: check out the 4am collection of cracked Apple II software running in an in-browser emulator, with full descriptions of how over 680 disks were de-copy-protected. And that's just one archivist, on one system: they have scores!
Dosbox and the like are great, but the sound is never right. Soundblaster 16/Pro/etc had a very distinct sound that none of the emulated stuff even approaches. Miss it mostly when playing Doom/Doom 2. The music is never right.