What 'rom info' type file formats are standard?

[Gray_Area]

MAME uses XML. I think some, perhaps older, emulators use dat. What is most common, etc?

[Howard_Casto]

Well to be honest I'm not sure what you mean.  Mame and a few others print them out, but I don't think any emulators actually use these reports, rather the rom managers do. 

Clrmamepro was the first rom manager.... it originally used dat files which were exactly like mame's original -listinfo printout only with the mame-specific data removed.  The other rom manager was romcenter.... it's format was a bit odd and had nothing to do with mame's output. 

Now mame uses a xml format and once again clrmamepro changed it's format to match mame's.  As a strange twist, romcenter now supports the same dats and thus mame's -listxml format is the defacto standard. 

Logiqx dats are still the best and you can get them for any emulator, so except in special cases (on-the-fly printouts for things like control viewers) what type of list an emulator outputs is irrelevant at this point.

As for the data the emulators actually print out:

Mame and Mess output listxml.
Demul outputs listxml.
Daphne Doesn't output anything. 
The rest???

I will tell you this.  Most emu developers don't bother with a info output and if they do it's usually just a simple test file with the rom followed by the game name.

Also console emulators, particulary classic console emulators are a different beast.  Because of the huge quantity of games they generally just don't have dats and rely on goodtools, which is totally different.

[Gray_Area]

I'm asking because I want to know how front ends make game lists, and for MAME it seems FEs consult the listxml. I'm looking for information to help improve game lists (game name vs rom name) displayed in FEs, in particular Mala.

[Howard_Casto]

I'm asking because I want to know how front ends make game lists, and for MAME it seems FEs consult the listxml. I'm looking for information to help improve game lists (game name vs rom name) displayed in FEs, in particular Mala.

Well in all honesty the data is generally easily available and easily parsable, it's just the FE's themselves don't read it properly or the users don't prepare their roms properly. 

As the user it's your responsiblity to run questionable roms through a rom manager  or good tools first so that the name is correct.  As a FE developer the responsibility lies in fully supporting listxml and roms renamed by goodtools in addition to giving users a way to simply convert a rom-Gamename text file into a crude list. 

Thinking about it further... there is a singular case in which nothing can really be done.... visual pinball.  The table names aren't standardized, the revision numbers aren't standardized, you might have the same table re-created 5 times by 5 different people, it isn't clear which pinmame roms go with which table and due to the complexity of actually downloading a complete set, a fully accurate dat file has never been created, much less verified.  In the case of visual pinball I always just used the table name as the rom name and left the rest up to the user.

[Gray_Area]

Well in all honesty the data is generally easily available and easily parsable, it's just the FE's themselves don't read it properly or the users don't prepare their roms properly. 

As a FE developer the responsibility lies in fully supporting listxml and roms renamed by goodtools in addition to giving users a way to simply convert a rom-Gamename text file into a crude list.

So you're saying there are basically two things to keep track of..... 

Thinking about it further... there is a singular case in which nothing can really be done.... visual pinball....

It seems the author of VPLauncher created his own file. While apparently 'out of date', it works just fine with VP9. -shrugs-