Does not make sense to me. The goal is to have every possible animation recorded. Currently this is done on a real pinball machine with the glass off and rolling the ball by hand to trigger all events with dmd scenes. The same method is used with vpin except that you guide the ball with the mouse pointer.

Record with a start stop button is a good idea.

The dump itself is working fine but it is hard to find and trigger the switch sequences by hand. Maybe simulating a ball running through a ramp which triggers the enter ramp and shortly after the made ramp switches would be helpful. Something like grouping switches together. Also when the dump is running you can save the file when the buffer is full but continue to record and save the next file without the header. That way you will end up with a sequence of raw files which could be joined together using something like copy /b

Maybe make these sequences configurable in the table config files. That way you could also simulate bumpers etc.

For the dump you could also add a merge routine for the files already stored on the harddisk when the dump is stopped and maybe pause the game during the save routine that no frames are lost.

With the pin2dmd editor you can load it as a recording. Larger files should be gzipped.
You can lookup the fileformat in the pinmame source (core.c I think)

pin2dmd editor can open raw files