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Woe to him who has a little knowledge. I have a 383 stroker, which until today was running fine. I wanted to do a little tuning on the VE tables, nothing too radical. I bought a Pocket Programmer 2, an ALDL adaptor cable, DataMaster to read the car while running, and TunerCat with the appropriate $DA2 definition file for my ECM. I took out the chip that my tuner, SloRVette, had made and carefully copied the bin file to my hard drive. I made sure that the bin file was OK, since I can open it in TunerCat and make changes (to a copy of the file). I used the Pocket Programmer to erase the 27SF512 chip and re-programmed it with the altered file. I know enough to start the device location at 08000 to account for a 32K file in a 64K device. I can even re-download the file from the chip and read the file in TunerCat, so everything should be OK.
But it isn't. When I insert the chip in the holder, attach the MemCal, and load it into the ECM, I get a SYS error with the fans running, symptomatic of a hardware failure. The MemCal by itself is OK, no error, but I can't run my 383 on the original code.
What am I doing wrong? My car is dead in the garage unless I can get a working chip back into it.
I am not a tuner, but I thought I read somewhere that if your file was half the size of the chip you have to 'stack' the file to fill the entire chip. I could be wrong though.
I am not a tuner, but I thought I read somewhere that if your file was half the size of the chip you have to 'stack' the file to fill the entire chip. I could be wrong though.
You're exactly correct. Unfortunately, that didn't help. The ECM only reads the upper 32K, so it's just as good to load the bin file starting at hex address 8000.
In any event, I found a work-around, so I'm back on the road. I posted the details on C4 Tech/Perf.