Installing better sounding patches
I suggest you install the Pro Patches Lite if you have 1 meg on your sound board, these patches sound much better. Follow the instructions in the package and it should work fine.

Playing DOS games
As many DOS games either do not work in a DOS box or do not support directly the GUS (hence needing an emulator), you will need to know how to setup your GUS to work in MS-DOS mode.

How to use your GUS in a plain vanilla DOS session (MS-DOS mode)
First of all, launch a DOS box under Windows, type SET and look for the following two lines:

ULTRASND=240,5,5,5,5
ULTRADIR=F:\ULTRASND

Record the values of the ULTRASND and ULTRADIR variables. If you  know how to create a custom DOS boot-up menu, chances are you'll know by now what to do. :-) Simply add these values to the %CONFIG%'s you need. The important thing to keep in mind is that the ULTRASND variable must be set to XXX,X,X,XX,XX before launching Windows.

On the other hand, if you do not know how to create a boot-up menu, I won't give you more trouble showing you how it works. Instead, you'll have to do this:

a) When doing a shutdown, ask Windows to Restart in MS-DOS mode

b) Once in MS-DOS, type:
    SET ULTRASND=aaa,b,c,d,e
    SET ULTRADIR=F:\ULTRASND

    Where aaa,b,c,d,e is be the the settings you've recorded earlier (in my case this would be 240,5,5,5,5) and F:\ULTRASND is the parent directory of the directory where you've stored your MIDI patches.
 

How to use the Megaem emulator
Many games released after 1994 support the GUS natively. You shouldn't have any trouble with these. However, if they do not support the GUS, you'll need to use an emulator.

There used to be many emulators for the GUS that had different features. However, Gravis released an emulator named Megaem which works well with most of the games and replaces all older emulators. It can emulate a Sound Blaster, a General MIDI device and a Roland MT-32.
If you wish to use your GUS with old games, I suggest you install Megaem in order to emulate these devices. If you use Megaem with Pro Patches Lite, you will need to use PPL's LARGE.BNK file in order to have better patches. Simply copy it in the directory where you've installed Megaem.

Megaem does not work in a Windows 95 DOS box. You will need to boot in a plain vanilla DOS session.

The first time you install Megaem, you'll need to run MESETUP in order to configure it. The configuration program is pretty straightforward. Afterwards, simply run MEGAEM each time you need to emulate a card and that's all you'll need to do. I you worship old games that only support the MT-32, you'll be glad you have a GUS!