First off, thanks to all of the knowledgeable people here maintaining informative threads. I've been burning my eyeballs out reading all that I can between here and the s4 wiki, and I think I might finally almost maybe possibly have the slightest grasp on how to start tuning ME7.5. I have a little experience working with Megasquirt, but from what I can tell, Bosch's Motronic is nothing like that.

I picked up a B5 Passat 1.8t a little while back, and got the itch to learn more about tuning, more for my own constant quest for knowledge than mega hp gains and found this forum to be immensely helpful.

My first step was to switch my narrowband motor to a wideband set up, so I picked up a spare AMW ECU and built a bench harness. Took some tinkering and troubleshooting, but I finally got it to connect, performed immo off, and turned VVT off since I'm not going to switch my tensioner to the variable one (I just installed a new non vvt tensioner, before I even started thinking about this stuff). Did the checksum verification, backed up the original bin via Galletto  (nefmoto wouldn't let me read it, says it might have been locked by a previous tuner, but I have no idea if it actually has a tune on it) and flashed my VVT deleted bin on no problem. Oh, also the ECU was a 018CM, but I flashed a 018CH bin since I can find more complete definitions for the CH, so if anyone else is wondering if those two are cross compatible, they are as far as I can tell. Next step is to start looking at my fuel and boost maps. I'm using the community 1.8t stage 1 thread as a guide along with the wiki. Most of my future questions are probably answered in there, but maybe you'll hear more from me as I get further along.