Oh hai there!
I've been heavily working on my website recently, as a result of which I've been looking for 404s and noticed the link from this thread. I forgot to allow downloads from the files directory, so the diff would have resulted in a 404, it should work now.
Needless to say I haven't abandoned the idea of patching MAME, and in fact I actually begun looking into it again a few months ago.
I did a fair bit of googling for a HLSL shader that gives a nice glow effect, but none of the ones I found I can get to work. :/ And alas this isn't my area of coding expertise.
I'm also having a bit of a scaling issue, I think there is an element of MAME code I'm misunderstanding.
Anyway, don't expect miracles in short time periods, but likewise I haven't completely abandoned the idea of doing this with the newer MAMEs.