You could use the MIDI file player in the Procedural MIDI Plugin to trigger sample playback (or a sample synth in the new audio engine) according to the pitch and duration of each note, separated by channels. You could even make it a bit more complex and support multisamples, though this might defeat the aesthetic point of replicating 16-bit era single sample soundfont-like playback…
I haven’t actually used the PMP’s MIDI file playback yet, but plan to use it this week… I’m expecting to have to map MIDI note pitch to playback rate/frequency, but that might just happen anyway - I forget what kind of inputs the sample synth component has.