MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - MAME 0.162 -listsoftware

Now that MAME is consolidated with MESS, I was curious to try using clrmamepro to process the software lists.

I found something interesting, the "-listsoftware" command doesn't list all the software lists. When using this command line:

Code:

MAME64 -listsoftware > "MAME SL.xml"

You get a nice big file about 46 MB long. I thought it would contain the same information as the contents of the hash folder's 377 .xml files. But it turns out there are only 355 software lists in the "MAME SL.xml" file.

That's 22 missing software lists, and they don't appear when importing the solftware lists into clrmamepro. This is the list if items not appearing from the "MAME -listsoftware" command:

Code:

3do_m2
advantage
amiga_flop
amigaaga_flop
amigaecs_flop
amigaocs_flop
bml3_flop
cd32
cgenie_cart
dim68k
exl100
genius
lisa2
nascom_flop
pippin_flop
pippin
sawatte
snes_vkun
tandy6k
vreader
vsmile_cd
wicat

Puzzled by this result, I tried creating the individual software lists one at a time on the command line. This worked fine:

Code:

MAME64 -listsoftware abc1600 > abc1600.xml

That gave me a nice 9 KB file. Well, abc1600 wasn't missing, so I expected that to work, and it did.

How about one of the missing ones, like pippin?

Code:

MAME64 -listsoftware pippin > pippin.xml

That gave me a very tiny file. Here are the contents:

Code:

No software lists found for this system

Hmmm. What's going on?

Please try this out for yourself, this will test six at a time. Copy and paste the following into a CMD window after changing the directory to where you have unpacked the MAME 0.162 binary from the MAMEdev site:

Code:

for %f in (pippin pippin_flop n64dd nascom_flop nascom_socket abc1600) do mame64 -listsoftware %f >%f.xml

(that command is all on one line, it got wrapped by this messageboard)

Even though nascom_socket is not on the missing list, it cannot be successfully be created as a single .xml file. There are others, too. How many?

I ran these commands to check all 377:

Code:

md rehash
for %f in (hash\*.xml) do mame64 -listsoftware %~nf > rehash\%~nf.xml

(that's two lines)

There were 171 that had valid .xml files, 7 that produced the "No software lists found for this system" all by itself inside the file without any .xml code, and 199 that each produced a zero length file.

So the question is, Is this the expected behavior of the listsoftware command?

Note: This is not an attempt to find another way to discern the arcade ROMs from the MESS BIOS ROMs.

EDIT:

Found another interesting thing, some of the individually created .xml files have more than one software list inside.

For example this one, CDTV (Amiga CDTV CD-ROMs), when created with this command:

Code:

mame64 -listsoftware cdtv > rehash\cdtv.xml

Has several other amiga software lists in it:

Code:

amiga_workbench
amiga_hardware
amiga_apps
cdtv

Well, it's supposed to have "cdtv", but why are the other three in there?

So I tried removing the three amiga .xml files from the hash folder, and tried to create the cdtv by itself. This time it worked, only producing the data for cdtv in the cdtv.xml.

Moving on, I tried cd32. When the hash folder is fully populated, the resulting file has multiple software lists in it (the same extra three as "cdtv" had). When I remove the three extra ones from the hash folder, the result is an empty cd32.xml. So work-around that worked on "cdtv" isn't working for "cd32".

Edited by mw (06/01/15 10:09 AM)