Oh I agree with you, no need to clarify.
I suggested hooking up the ledwiz to mame drivers that have outputs and was humored but nobody but me bothered to look into it. This seems sad to me as it'd make powermame a legitimate build that actually does something useful. You see all of the features that powermame does can be done externally, so there is no reason to even have the build.
I mean literally, you can do keyboard led tracking externally, you can load a different ledwiz for each game externally, you can set the gp49 mode externally ect. And all of this can be done via a resident app that simply monitors the mame caption too so it doesn't aid in the ease of launch either as the appropriate stuff can be called automatically.
I think the qbert knocker was hooked up, but that's about it.
I don't have any ill will towards powermame, the guy who made it and the people that use it, I just share your frustration.
Especially considering immediately after the features were announced for the build I made a nice post that said something along the lines of "I don't mean to offend, but all of that stuff can be done without hacking the mame driver, and it's a bad idea to do things on a custom build if you don't have to because most custom builds are seldom updated or down right abandoned."
Everyone promptly ignored me and a few months later pm is all but abandoned and guys like me are going to have to "save" the poor schmucks that bought ggg products by making proper, external apps that won't have to be constantly updated.
Also I was assured that the ledwiz inclusion was added so that the product could interact with mame. As I said, I think the qbert driver is hooked up... that's something.