I am hearing about people bricking their ECUs trying to read cars that were previously flashed? Some encryption/ address shifting trick to keep people from reading a "commercial" tune? Not entirely familiar with this process.. Why does reading a previously "tuned" ecu cause a bricked situation?
I picked up this Car/ECU from a previous owner and suspect it has been messed with. What route should I go with to avoid possibly bricking it?
Should I flash it with the stock BIN from the beginning? Or should I read the flash and possibly brick it in the process? Is this "bricked" situation something the Galletto 1260 + Boot mode is supposed to fix? Trying to avoid this situation.
The current "Tune" that came with the car, while removing some emission components, has significantly retarded timing. Led me down this rabbit hole. Been having dreams about this stuff I read about it so much.
http://nefariousmotorsports.com/forum/index.php?topic=12043.0title=Another Bin and XDF
There was all kinds of nonsense used back in the ME7 days. Some tuners used fancy riser boards with programmable logic on them which would scramble the addresses on the flash chip, so that when they were accessed directly as maps, the data would be correct, but when they were accessed sequentially to read, you'd get garbage. These wouldn't usually cause a brick on read though, just bad data. Depending on how they were implemented they could cause bricks on write, although usually it just wouldn't work.
Other tuners used much less advanced riser boards which just scrambled the data on the flash chip using lazy tricks like swapping address lines. These could be read over OBD but not using a flash chip programmer - back in the day when everyone knew hardware but nobody knew software, this was a real protection! Often these were used to implement a dealer model where dealers could only write a certain number of tunes.
Other particularly evil tunes would brick the ECU intentionally by just patching the Read handlers in KWP to become "brick" handlers. The less evil ones would just return garbage data or snarky messages instead. This is the big hazard when reading over OBD.
To avoid both of these things, open the ECU, check for a riser board, then read/write in boot mode. This is also the safest way to get a clean slate: flash a stock file in boot mode (Galletto). And this is the recommended place to start.
As for XDF, not many people use TunerPro. Your best bet there is to acquire WinOLS, or to ask someone if they can export the OLS to a KP (WinOLS version of an XDF), and then transform the KP to an XDF. ecuxplot comes with a tool called mapdump which will then turn (old!) OLS KP files into XDFs.
