Ever since the MESS project merged with MAME, the "mame -listxml" command now
includes not only arcade machines but also home computers, game consoles, and
various other devices previously supported by MESS.

This confuses established MAME front-ends like mine (GNOME Video Arcade) into
listing all kinds of machines that are not arcade machines, and unfortunately
(AFAIK) the XML output contains no clues for front-ends to filter only arcade
games.

Hence, please consider providing an alternate MAME package with a binary named
/usr/games/mame-arcade which is built as follows:

   make SUBTARGET=arcade

This will instruct the build tools to only include arcade machine drivers in
the resulting binary, similar to MAME before the merge with MESS.

Relevant front-end packages like gnome-video-arcade should then be tweaked to
depend on "mame-arcade" instead of "mame".

have you tried to contact the upstream developers about this issue ?

I have used
http://forums.bannister.org/ubbthreads.php?ubb=postlist&Board=8&page=1
in the past as a way to contact them, and they have been mostly responsive

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