mame rom/version and xml questions

[keilmillerjr]

I posted these questions in this thread here, and haven't received any response. I decided to ask these questions in it's own thread to hopefully gather a response.

So I decided to try to create a rails app (website) to store the steam grid images for mame.

The idea is to have an app such as Ice to access the api and download the appropriate images, download images yourself by accessing the website, or the website will stream a zip file containing all the images on the fly. Obviously, clones should not require an image as the would be the same or a very similar image.

So I ran mame.exe -listxml >mame.xml to generate a list of supported games for my current mame version, which is 0.152. Hopefully I can process these lists, and have them populate the database. This will enable me to make sure all images and file names are up to date.

• an image has a parent
• a parent has many clones

Here's a few questions I have for the mame experts:

• Can the game "name" change between mame versions? Example: 10yard(.zip), 10yard85(.zip) I know that the rom files inside the zip can change.
• For instance, game "name=32x" is obviously not a game. It does not have the isbios or isdevice attributes. What attribute is only unique to game roms? I need a way to filter through this file so I can get info on the parents and their clones.

[ark_ader]

Go ask that on the mameworld forum.

You will have better luck.