New to E38 / E67 bin. Need a little help just to get started

[hjtrbo]

Hey all,

Doing ok with HP / PCMtec software tuning but am very green in the binary world. I'm looking for the push onto the other side!

Case:
I have an E67 running my VF HSV Clubsport LSA that I have recently put onto flex fuel. Coming into winter the cold starts might become an issue. I had a peak at EFILive and they have a couple of tables mapped that HP do not that relate to ethanol cold start modifiers. The car is tuned with HP.

Being that E38 seems to be more popular and that the Caprice L77 was factory flex I grabbed a 2012 Caprice HPtune, EFILive tune and a Binary to have a play.

I download winols demo and watched the intro videos. I loaded up one of my Falcon bins and quite easily found the desired boost map with the help of looking at my Falcon tune with PCMTec Workshop verison. This was just to get my feet wet.

Now, I am not having the same easy success with E38. Everything look like gibberish compared to the falcon maps. I have view set to decimal 16 bit. Searching for basic terms like 6000 (as in 6000rpm) to try and find an axis header or data next to it that looks like a table does return anything meaningful. So clearly I am missing something very fundamental. I was hoping that you might be prepared to push me in the right direction. Even if I ditch winols for something else that is better suited to E38 / E67.

Any input is highly appreciated. Thanks all.

[antus]

GM Generally does not have table headers like Ford so you cant as easily find tables in WinOLS. You'll need to make the changes in one app, have a way to read it back as a bin, and see what changed. Then look at the headers and rows in your commercial software and you need to figure out the table sizing and the conversions for the table data. This tool might help you with the bins. Or ideally you might be able to find a tunerpro XDF for the OSID you need. Though I dont think there is that much done with E38 yet. I could be wrong, Im still mostly working the generations before it myself. viewtopic.php?f=3&t=6666

[hjtrbo]

Yes I grabbed that tool last night. Looks easy to use. Ta.

[hjtrbo]

Doing some more digging, is it right to say that the bin data doesn't have maps stored in human readable format. I.e. it needs to be run through some tool (decompiler) to make it readable???

[antus]

yes, generally speaking all maps in all ECUs are stored in machine useful formats, not human readable. Most tuning tools know where the maps are and how to convert whats there to human readable formats for the tuning. Some manufacturers include header data around their tables in a common format which WinOLS can use to define the table, but not Delco/Delphi. Tunerpro is generic software, the XDF (eXtended Defininition Format) tells it what and where the tables are, the headers, and the equation to convert machine format to human format for the screen. Tunerpro doesnt include many XDFs with itself, you are at the mercy of someone who has done the hard yards to create one for your OSID (operating system id). You cant mix and match XDFs with OSIDs they are not written for. Some low quality tuning apps dont give you the equasion and just show you a table with arbitary units so you can do 'more' or 'less' but cant measure what your looking at. This is also what you can sometimes find in WinOLS without the table header. Fortunately GM PCMs are an evolution so as you learn more about the ecosystem or similar PCMs you often find the same equations and similar looking tables are present. So if you can get a handle on some data in one OS, you can often translate that to another by similar location, similar shape, often the same column headers and equasion.

[hjtrbo]

Got it. So we are lucky with the Falcons then. They kindly left the maps in plain view. GM, not so nice.

I guess then the holy grail for someone like me then is to dig everywhere to find only 1 xdf for E38 and the corresponding bin. Even if its only partially complete. So far having no luck. The search continues.

Even if someone could graciously provide a crumb that might be enough to get me going. I.e. something simple like the high octane spark table

[Tazzi]

XDFs don't exist for them since easy to use flashing software has not really existing for them for long either.

As your VF is using an E67, I would not be trying to make it work with an E38 if you don't want their to be a variety of other errors and warnings on screen too.

[kur4o]

Hey all,

. I was hoping that you might be prepared to push me in the right direction. Even if I ditch winols for something else that is better suited to E38 / E67.

You can test this new tool.
viewtopic.php?f=42&t=7753

It completely covers searching for table pointers for ppc split address lookup.
There is a sample overview for e38 tableseek. You can closely examine it, and likely figure what is needed to perfome cusom table searching.
There is also a built in advanced search engine[utilities->patcher->file info tab] that can help you with testing stuff. Than you can map results in the tableseek file and if the pattern is good enough it will work with most OS.

[Tre-Cool]

u need to take into consideration that both efilive & hpt compress & encrypt their files. so you won't see the raw bin file data.

i often make changes with hpt, then pull out using taz's tool in bin format, so i can find the changed code, then create a cax file for efilive. you can then search for similar code across different OS versions for the same parameter.

[hjtrbo]

As your VF is using an E67, I would not be trying to make it work with an E38 if you don't want their to be a variety of other errors and warnings on screen too.

The only reason I wanted to use E38, specifically WM Caprice is this file has all the flex fuel parameters populated. My E67 OS had quite a few of those same tables all at 0. Using HP Tuners I have populated all available flex fuel tables to reflect WM Caprice and the car is starting and running very well on 98, blended and full e85. It is only the 2 cranking fuel tables that HP doesn't have that I will have to do by hand, or possibly consider the purchase of HP Tuners User Defined Parameters option.

The idea was to get the table data out of E38 as that will be populated, then start the mission to find where that same table exists in my E67 OS and populate it if it was 0'd out.

With some help (you know who you are, thanks mate) the tables have been located in a different E67 OS to what I have. As it turns out they are already populated so there is nothing to gain by me exposing them to HP Tuners UDP. Using the tools available on this site I will get a bin read of my OS and double check to see if the tables are in the same (or similar) place and verify they contain the same data. Should that be the case, then all this was a waste of time lol.

All is not lost, I have learned heaps and understand the way GM makes it next to impossible without detailed information to determine what table is what and even how to interpret the data within it.

I don't know if this was the right thing to do, but I just purchased a E67 definition file from Tunercat. The purpose is to use the definition editor to learn more about the raw tables and see if anything has been defined that EFI and HP haven't got that may be useful to further tune. Again, could be a waste of time / money but regardless it will still help me learn a bit more about E38/67 PCM's.

For the new guys out there reading this, here is what you get using winOLS out of the box when reading a E38/67 bin vs a Aussie Ford Falcon bin. GM is nasty.

GM.JPG (87.73 KiB) Viewed 3827 times

Ford.JPG (107.7 KiB) Viewed 3827 times