> Ok a bit of an exaggeration. I think it's silly that it needs so many.
It's only silly if you think about it from your point of view: you want to use your own shader.
But that's not what it was designed to do (I guess. I'm just a user. MooglyGuy wrote the thing). It was aimed at simulating every part of a CRT monitor + extras like NTSC artifacts. Not as a way to let end users run arbitrary filters of their choice. So it just wasn't intended to be hacked up the way you want and that's why it isn't so easy to do so.
So assuming everything in the HLSL system was working perfectly, which it isn't, then you would be expected to just turn off the bits you don't want and adjust the parameters for the rest. Not modify the shader code at all.
Only the SDL GLSL system is geared towards what you're doing. But like you said, it isn't functioning in 0.153. There was only the one complaint over on the SDLMame board and that's probably why it hasn't been fixed yet. Probably the only dev aware that there might be a problem is R.Belmont and he is but a single human(?) being.
I would probably just relax for a bit until we have some idea if/when the GLSL effects will be working again. In the mean time you might try compiling your own SDL build from an older version of the code and get your shader working there.