well, that explains it, thanks! Wasn't there something similar to listxml back then? like -listall or some such?
I wouldn't be surprised that even if you found the first incarnation of -listxml, the formatting of it might be different enough that it would be unusable to romlister. I just don't know. IIRC, when I wrote it, mame was in the early 100's, so anything before that could be suspect.
If you can send me a file that has each game's name, year, manufacturer, etc in it, I can likely write some quicky translation to xml for it.
-jeff!