Good morning Craig,
Yes it is a personalized copy, plus a lot more. What wasn't shown was that one of the icons on the top starts another application with several tabbed notebook pages with probably a hundred fields to do various tasks that I use in making bamboo fly rods, reel seats and other hardware. When I started this project altering any screen set in mach3 required using screen4 (nick named scream4 since it crashed often and lost all of the changes you made) require bitmaps for everything visual and wasn't sizable. It would have taken ten times as long to develop the screens in Mach3. My modules are all sizable, can be hidden or shown, and buttons customizeable without closing down and reopening the app like you have to do even now in Mach4. The MDI is always available, the Gcode is run a line at a time so I didn't have to put in a bunch of while isMoving Wend statements. I could load and unload a sets of buttons with predefined Gcode or scripts (think probing), create leds and user DROs to show variable values on the fly which was great for testing scripts. Too many more benefits to name here.
Mach4 has certainly gone a long way to eliminate some of the shortcomings especially in screen set development and making it event driven like mine. Yes, I could now create lua panels to replicate what I have but that is redundant, would take 100's of hours to design and code and should not be necessary.
A plugin could be made to work but my reading of the Mach4 core API you must be a 'licensed developer' to be able to install one.
I could write my database to a csv file and load that data but then any changes made to the database requires that I export the data for each change. That's bad system management, just asking for trouble. I can create a dll that a lua script should be able to load and call functions in the dll, I haven't gone down that raod yet, I would rather use what I have already poured hundreds of hours of time into by just being able to instantiate a COM interface to Mach4 and tell it to run a file.
And this is just a hobby!