Old Mamewah and New MAME problems

[Mr. Dude]

Hey guys,
I've had my cab running great for the last year or so using Mamewah version 0.963 as my front end.  Well, just recently I upgraded my MAME romset and version from .74 to .96 and I cannot get it to work with mamewah.  What I'm wondering is am I just doing something wrong or is the old version of mamewah incompatable with new versions of MAME?  I would hate to upgrade to the new Mamewah version since I have all of my other emulators set up just the way I like with version 0.963.  Anyway, If you guys have any advice to help me out I'd really appreciate it!   

[elvis]

The old MAMEWah expects the legacy datfile format, not the new XML format that the new MAME uses.

You need to tell MAMEWah to use a datfile and not the emulator itself to generate a list of available games.

To create a legacy datfile, open your command prompt (Start -> Run -> cmd.exe) and in your mame folder type:

mame -listxml | xml2info > datfile.dat

The resulting "datfile.dat" will be an older style datfile that your version of MAMEWah can read, and use to generate game lists.

[Mr. Dude]

Thanks Elvis!  I'm gonna go give that a shot.

[Mr. Dude]

Okay, I tried that out and it didn't work.  It still won't create the game list even if I use the newly created dat file.  I can change the list options to "rom folder only" and get a list of games showing as the romnames.  Any other suggestions? 

[pointdablame]

I haven't used the older Mamewah in a while, but in the new one, you could solve this by changing your "list_generation_method" in your mame.ini file.

I forget the file structure of the old Mamewah, but check you .ini files and general settins for a list generation method.

[Mr. Dude]

Yeah, it's completely different from the new mamewah.  It won't recognize the dat file of newer mame versions like ver .98 so when I try to use the correct list generation method it doesn't create a gamelist.  The only way I can create a game list is by "selecting rom folder only".  Is there a way to use a .NMS or something?  Elvis had the right idea... I'm just not sure why it didn't work out?