My frontend, Emu Loader, parse the entire -listxml in about 18 seconds and it scan the listxml.xml file from top to bottom three times over so games can be properly detected and separated by type (device set, bios set, parent set, clone set). It takes all that time because the frontend gets a lot of info from each game. But of course, MAME takes around 24 seconds to generate a full listxml output. My frontend reads listxml.xml as a plain text file and it detects tags manually.
If you just need set title, set name, set cloneof, bios/device references then it will be very fast to parse listxml output (around 5 seconds or so). I don't know what set info IV/Play gets from MAME or how it validates ROMs/CHDs though.
If you parse the games list every time the frontend is loaded, then after the listxml.xml output file is generated for the first time, you could keep it around until IV/Play detects a new MAME binary at startup, then it created a new listxml file.
Ciro Alfredo Consentino
home: http://emuloader.mameworld.info
e-mail: [email protected]
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