Hi everybody,
Even though this is my very first post here, I'm lurking around for quite some time now. The reason I'm coming out of hiding the because I have something to share.
While I was building my Arcade Cabinet I came across MaLa and fell in love with this great Arcade Frontend immediatly. Setting it up for MAME was a breeze with it's build in support for the mame.xml file which holds all MAME rom information. It wasn't too long before I was scrolling through my list of MAME games and playing a few through the MaLa Frontend.
After that I added my other emulators (SNES, MSX, PCE, etc.) so they would run from MaLa too. I checked out the MaLa Gamelist Editor and added a few games for my newly added emulators. No sweat! Things were running great!
But then it came to me: I would have to add all games for my other emulators by hand. Autch! I'm a completionist and thus I wanted to have a list with ALL games for each emulator I was running and, as you might know, SNES alone has over 11.000 roms.
I asked my good friend Google to find me a way that wouldn't involve me adding 10.000's of games by hand and it came up with quite a few interesting places, but unfortunatly no solution to my "problem". After looking around for a bit more I came across a great program called ROMLister which can generate filtered gamelists by using MAME's XML file as input. One of the output formats was the "MaLa Gamelist".
That gave me an idea. What if I would code a little program that would generate a valid ROMLister input XML file from a directory of roms? Would that REALLY make my life easier? Well, not perse, but at least I wouldn't have to spend an insane amount of hours to add games through the MaLa Gamelist Editor by hand.
So I coded my little program and have been using it with succes for a few days now.
Seeing that I couldn't find a direct solution to the problem at hand on the internet, I assumed that other people might have stumbled upon the same problem too and might be interested in my program.
So, here it is. I named it RomDir2XML. ;-)
For the program and a little tutorial to get you up and running (errr.. playing) in no-time visit
http://spiderstyle.arachno-media.comI hope it'll be as much of use to you folks as it's for me.
With kind regards,
Spiderstyle