1. The scanline support in MAME (as compared to the HLSL shaders) is somewhat inaccurate in that most monitors don't really have outright black lines so much as darkened.
2. HLSL does everything the old system does but offloads 100% to the GPU. As HLSL-compatible cards are going to be more and more common from here on out (all modern cards will support it) there's no reason NOT to offload to the GPU to spare CPU cycles. HLSL is more accurate on even older LCD displays-- 1280x1024 and 1360x768 show significant improvement if you've got even a decent video card.
3. It's not feature creep when it's making an existing feature more accurate-- there IS no comparison, the new HLSL shaders look and act more accurate than the old system-- *AND* it allows for the MESS project to emulate certain kinds of video signal quirks correctly that the older system simply COULD NOT handle.
4. It's been said time and time again, and I'm going to repeat this for the eight millionth time this week: The MAME development team works on whatever part they want to work on. They have no responsibility to you, me, or anyone else. If you want to work on older drivers, feel free to step in and work on them. Submissions of decent code are perfectly welcome-- that's how the HLSL shaders got added, after all.
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Try checking the MAME manual at http://docs.mamedev.org
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