83 Crossfire TA

iTrader: (2)

My "new" daily driver, a '93 Fleetwood Brougham (long story, low miles, cheap and I like it better than my new cars) is going to get some engine changes and I'm debating what direction to go in with programming for them and am wondering what you guys would choose in 2024. Considerations:

• it is my daily, reliability, diagnostics and ease of getting parts/repair is a bigger consideration than for a weekend toy/racecar. I want to keep things like the digital dash working (otoh, my megasquirted '87 Trans Am with it's atari dash was mostly a non issue)
• I played with GM ECMs back in the day (I bought my first 3rd gen in '91) and I've never been happy with my results. I've never found programming GM ECMs intuitive. I suppose if I'm sticking with the stock ECM (I don't even know what it is, I had a '92 K1500 with a L05 and it turned out to have an oddball '299 ecm that I ended up swapping for the more common 7747) I'd probably want to at least add emulation... (I still have my old chip burning stuff)
• I've built a few Megasquirts and my '87 Trans Am is currently running a Megasquirt (I have at least one spare MS and a Micro squirt sitting around, it would probably be the lowest price of entry for me). I doubt that I can get a plug in adapter board like I have for the TA, and MS doesn't have the fail safe/limp home and diagnostics a stock ECM does
• Speeduino- as far as I can tell this is a more modern version of MS running on an arduino. Looks like it uses the same programming interface and software.
• EBL- I'm not sure how active this is anymore. I know that the web page is up but I've heard that they are basically out of stock, maybe permanently. In my mind it's the best and worst of all worlds- has the redundancy/limp home and diagnostics of a stock GM ECM, modern features and interface, but I suspect that I'd find it just as unintuitive and not be happy with the results like my GM ECM experience. Of course if it has a VE tuner... maybe it's better.
• Going with modern aftermarket like Holley seems overkill and adding to the work, so I'm not currently considering it but if someone has a good argument maybe that will change.

What would you do?