I was actually trying to nudge you in the direction that perhaps the unemployed programmer might find that patching the program instead of bemoaning it to be quite rewarding... Perhaps I was too hyper-subtle. BTW, MAME can easily go on your resume... But yeah, if I get a chance this weekend I'll take a look at it. Do me a favor and PM me the location where they're building the listxml info.
http://haze.mame.net is where the latest source for mame is sitting right now, which is kinda funny
Get that source. There is an xml2info folder. Commandline options are handled in [OS]/config.c [OS] being dos, windows, etc... You can follow the structs there to see where info is being stored.
Edit, list commandline options are handled in fronthlp.c. thee algorithms for listing are in info.c
As HC said, I have tried to contribute to mame before. Still trying to get my artwork enhancements through. To see all I hve done goto my website and click hacks.
Right now other projects supercede doing this. Like getting the cgi going for the controls.dat. My FE. Having mame output to ctrlr files from within a menu. And other open source projects. I still want to make a MythTV for windows using dscaler and xmltv, both of which are open source.