> I was wondering if it was possible to use my own custom pixel shader in windows mame, > rather than HLSL. IMO, HLSL is rather poor, and way too resource hungry for what it > does. I wrote a shader which I think is much better, but I can't see any way of using > it.
The SDLMame and SDLMess versions support GLSL shaders. The regular Windows binary supports the HLSL feature only. The SDL builds are mostly used on Linux/Mac platforms, but the shaders work fine in SDLMame/SDLMess for Windows (or they did the last time I tried them...).
There are basic point and bilinear filters floating around the message boards. Also, cgwg has an excellent CRT shader that gets used in a bunch of emulators (bsnes, retroarch, etc). Some versions are available for MAME/MESS. There are a couple threads on another board where SDLMame/SDLMess gets discussed more often.
Here is a guide (not for windows but it doesn't matter), but it looks like they have the shader files you'll need. Either to use, or to to look at while you write you own shader.