[hatzie]

Originally Posted by EVRLET

I have HP tuners and have tuned several PCMs. I will say factory PCMs are decent at best. I have bricked a few of them. When I spoke to HP Tuners at SEMA last year, they said you can’t predict how many times a PCM can be rewritten. The circuit boards are 10-20 years old and while some can be retuned 100s of times, some may only be retuned a few times. HP Tuners won’t give you a new PCM if you end up bricking it.

All in all I still mess with HP Tuners but for builds like yours, the standalone is, in my opinion, the way to go. For those on a budget and don’t want to spend the $1k and up for a stand-alone, factory PCMs will get you started but I would recommend upgrading to a stand alone somewhere down the road.

Bricked is only the end of the line if you let it be.

If you have the hot air soldering equipment you can float the flash chips off a PCM board and install new ones.
They're a lot more robust than your garden variety Apple or Sony product.

I've replaced the flash chips on more than one mid 90's LT1 ECM. Several times I just flashed the same old AMD flash chips with an EPROM burner and re-installed them.