[LAU] Sound Chip as a synthesizer on Linux. Thoughts, ideas?

Hi all, I have a question on a topic not frequently addressed here, but why not just asking? Do any of you run some old sound blaster/adlib/gravis ultrasound card? I mean the ones with chip synthesizers. Just started reading a lot about the commodore 64's SID and just found out lot of my childhood's games actually run the audio on actual synths, which freaked me out totally. It would be nice to have any kind of synth chip running as a hardware synthesizer on a linux computer, really. In my country, the only PCI card with an OPL compatible chip is the YMF744b, which seems to be supported by ALSA. Getting that would mean starting to search for methods to create .o3 (instrument patches) files to be loaded to the card, for which there seems to be no dedicated native linux software. Maybe through DOSbox? Anyway. These are still just ideas, because the topic is very vast; there are lots of different sound chips, and I'm even considering getting a c64 to use it as a sort of assembler csound, if that makes sense. People familiar to the demoscene are aware of these kind of devices' powerfulness, but most of that that I've witnessed is tempered scale based and traditionaly rhythmically structured (and they really rock it that way), but it would be interesting (to me, anyway) to experiment creating sound textures and evolving timbres on these sort of hybrid soft-hard synths. *I might be missing lots of important details on the subject* So, do you people have any way to enlighten me on this? Any thoughts or ideas? Thanks a lot, really. Fede