Mame rom information

[zerocle]

I just have a quick question, how do the front end's get the rom information(game name, required files, game type, controller, etc. ) from the rom files? is it a database file that they just reference? or a mame function?

[screaming]

MAME ROM information comes from MAME itself.  Front ends will run MAME and pass a commandline parameter (-listxml), which will output an XML file with all the info.  Front ends then parse this information and normalize it with its list of available ROMs.

[Howard_Casto]

Before you ask, other emulators get their data from clrmamepro dat files, which are based on listinfo, which is what listxml is also based upon. 

[zerocle]

Wow thanks for the quick replies guys, that helps alot, I had gone through the mame command line options and I hadnt been able to find it. Thanks for the help :-)