Aristocrat MKIV & MameHooker - Hopper?

[Lord-Data]

Hi all,
I'm playing with the Artistocrat emulators on MAME (MKIV) and found that the button lights work perfectly via MameHooker without any issues. The 'Collect' function however does not seem to work/be detected by MameHooker.
I've been looking at the source:
http://mamedev.org/source/src/mame/drivers/aristmk4.c.html

And trying to see why that is. Anyone here might be a bit more insightful than I can make from it at the moment. Is the hopper control simply being 'emulated in memory' and not output anywhere, or is it just a type of output that MameHooker doesn't support/understand?
If the former, would it be a simple patch to the source to recompile the base driver to enable it to be output, or would that be majorly complicated? I'm fluent in C, but it's been many years since working in it, and haven't had much time to pour over the source yet. If the later, is there a way to get MameHooker to support the output, or could it be converted to a 'lamp' type so I can use Mamehooker to drive an output that will then drive a relay and then drive the hopper perhaps?

Long shot I guess, but just curious if anyone else knows some more information on this level..