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Aaron removes xml2info as of u12 (in other words, we are screwed)
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Howard_Casto:
Gotta agree with the peanut gallery on this one. 

I don't think that learning a "new" standard is what bothers me, what bothers me is it isn't any better than the old one. If anything it's worse.  The dom objects and such are supposed to make xml eaiser to parse, but without the help of sax (which is useless if you are trying to look up a specific record) you can't even load a frikkin file as large as listxml.  All I know is I can load the entire listinfo file in any langauge in less than a second and parse it in less than a minute.  Even with the aid of sax I'd say the speed is going to be considerably slower parsing the xml. 


Like it or not xml is very much a fad.  I just hate to see it  used so heavily in mame because it isn't "future proof" and therefore in a few more years we might see all of this happening again. 



Just for the record even puny old vb6 supports all the major xml parsers, it's just none of them are very good, that's what I'm getting at.  Not vb's fault, it's the parsers fault.  I think my only hope is to look into xsl and convert the listxml into a real ascii format.
Buddabing:
I think control viewer authors like Howard and myself should be excited about this change in u12:


--- Quote ---Added multiple input controls in -listxml output for games with more
than one type. Added pedal control type. Added more info on analog
controls as defined in the driver: minimum, maximum, sensitivity,
keydelta, and reverse. This required the 'control' attribute in the
XML to be moved into an element. There can now be more than one
'control' element in the input secction. [uRebelScum]

--- End quote ---

Howard_Casto:
Yeah I'm aware of the new data... I'm always excited about new data.  If it just wasn't presented in such a worthless format we'd be all set.  ;)
Effayy:

--- Quote from: Howard_Casto on July 17, 2006, 02:18:09 pm ---Yeah I'm aware of the new data... I'm always excited about new data.  If it just wasn't presented in such a worthless format we'd be all set.

--- End quote ---


Howard, I may be off base with this, but I don't consider XML to be all that worthless when taken from the standpoint that the output can then be transformed a myriad of different ways to suit external apps.

Yeah, it takes time to transform that data into an individualized format, but it's at least in an industry-standard format now that is versitile enough to be transformable into whatever you see fit for your external app.

- FA
Howard_Casto:
So can listinfo.  The difference is listinfo can be transformed into various formats without the use of external plugins and with next to no difficulty. 

As I've pointed out several times in this thread xml is difficult to deal with when the file is as large as this one.  I'm all about industry standards, but only when they make sense to use with the data at hand. 

As much as I loathe msAccess, even it would have been a better base format. 

Or delimeted text files.  Any idiot (myself included) can parse text files. 


There's also the issue of other emulators.  My fe and several of the newer ones treat mame like any other emulator.  We can do this and still have advanced filtering due to clrmamepro files, which are pretty much the standard for getting rom names and descriptions (as well as 5 or 6 other fields). Guess what the clrmame dats are based off of?  You guessed it, listinfo.  So in terms of emulators, listinfo pretty much is the "industry standard".   ;)


Anyway I'm done complaining. 
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