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What's New?
Control Manager 4 makes several improvements over earlier versions as well as adding some new functionality. If you're familiar with the earlier releases you probably noticed that the installation has been redone using the InnoSetup installer engine. The new installer uincludes the components that were formerly in the CM Utility Pack. It also has the capability of updating existing installations of Control Manager 4 (and later) without the need to uninstall. This capability can also be used to add the CM Utility Pack programs to an existing CM4 installation, so if you didn't install the CMCC, CMPrint, or CMList and later decide that you want to use them, simply run the installer again. More information on the new setup capabilities are available in the section on Installation Options and the Inno Setup in the Credits section.

There are some additional programming capabilities too. CM4 incorporates a new method for programming lists of commands to buttons that will be sent one at a time as the button is pressed repetitively. This is useful for programming toggle functions and sequential operations that formerly required the use of a SELECT block in a CMS script. More information on List Mode programming is available in the List Mode section.

CM4 also adds basic support for the so-called "Windows Keys" (RWIN and LWIN) as these have begun to show up in some recent games. Support is the minimal "named key" support as is used for keys like "LSHF", "RSHF".

The Control Manager GUI also has some new additions. CMC macros are marked if they have been used so you can tell at a glance whether a particular command has already been used. This is covered in the section on Inserting Commands for more information.

There's also a new "Command Finder" which lists the CMC commands with those that have been used marked. Clicking on a marked command will take the GUI screen to the button where the command is used. See the section on the Command Finder for more information.

The CM Editor has been reworked too. It uses "SynEdit" now as the editor engine. This is a much better editor than the earlier version, highlighting is much faster and the functionality is greatly improved. Shortcuts are available for the more commonly used commands and there is a facility for automatic command completion that is useful when you can't recall exactly how a command needs to be written. More information on using SynEdit is located in CM Editor section of this manual as well as the Synedit topic in the "Credits" section of the Appendix at the end of this Users Guide. Be sure and read it over as the new functionality can be a great help in creating CMS and CMC files.

Finally, there are some new variables available to your CMS script if you're using the CM Control Center. These allow you to get and to set the screen cursor position, and to determine what the current screen resolution is from within your CMS script files. For more information on these functions, see the section on CMCC Screen and Mouse Variables.