I was able to get the surface dial working as a spinner in BigBox and Mame. I use in BigBox to scroll the game wheel and select a game. In Mame I use as a dial control. You have to create a custom app in the wheel settings for BigBox or Mame. You then map the left and right wheel spin to a keyboard key combination. Finally for Mame you need to use an AHK script to map the keyboard key combination you selected in the last step to something like the up, down. left, or right keys. You can then configure these keys in Mame input setting for the dial analog dec and inc settings. You must also make sure Mame is set to dinput for keyboard in the ini file, or pass as a command argument to Mame in the launch emulator settings. I tried to map wheel to mouse input, which worked, but unfortunately I couldn't get Mame to recognize the mouse movements for analog control.
Few steps to get it working unfortunately, but the end result is a fairly decent wireless spinner with pretty good sensitivity. You could also fine tune the sensitivity in the AHK script if required. Here is a copy of my AHK script if interested. I use Ctrl U and Ctrl D as my keyboard mappings in the wheel settings.
#MaxHotkeysPerInterval 2000
SetKeyDelay 0, 50
^u::Send {Up}
^d::Send {Down}