That doesn't make any sense either. Early revisions of midway games in the 90's (think MK) often were incomplete.
I think the problem with the way mame does things right now is it's trying to use the parent/clone relationship to handle three things, when it can only effectively handle one.
You've got the parent/clone relationship. What that's supposed to be is that the game with the bulk of the roms (typically the first revision) is the parent. And the rest only have minor graphical/programming differences. It should be the first "finished" revision from the country of origin.
Now you've also got regions. Regions should be another thing all-together and each rom should have it's own set of region flags (language, and release area).
Then you've got variants. These are actually totally different games (like ultimate mortal kombat 3/mortal kombat 3) but because they are an "expansion pack" they are put into the clone category in mame.
How I've always thought mame should work is this:
1. The parent name doesn't represent any specific rom, but rather the game that is going to be loaded.
2. Mame has a language setting... it also hase a region setting (north america, europe, ect)
3a. When you use the parent name to launch mame, it searches your roms for the latest revision of the game. If possible it also tries to find a version that matches the release area and/or the language.
3b. If you use one of the clone names, it overrides all of these other settings and launches the specific rom you requested.
I'll bet it would be a colossal pain in the butt to redo everything to work this way, but boy would it alleviate a lot of headaches. And it isn't like listxml would keel over if two more flags were added.
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