JPrevost

Well this might still be a question but I think I figured it out with just trying a few different calibrations. 8746 and maybe 7747 ecm.
BTW, this was edited with TunerCat, if you're using the same thing, remember to close the Main SA table before you change the Main SA bias. Then reopen and the values should have all changed according to where the bias was and where you set it too. If you go from 0 to 20 then everything on the main SA table will have had 20 subtracted from each cell, if you go the other way on the bias, it should add the difference.
Now for the strange stuff. I have the timing spit out the aldl in place of the eprom id, winaldl then displayed the decimal value (0-255) and I just multiplied it by 90/256 to get it into degrees.
The test was performed using Craig's 8 in 1 so I could switch between the calibrations without restarting the car.
I started off with my latest bin. It's basically the ANLU with 0 degree's SA slope, no 3rd gear tcc lock, egr off, timing being sent through aldl, cool comp spark vs load table almost all zero's and the VE tables have been modified.
This was called a7.bin which stands for the 1st calibration of 8.
a6 was the same bin but initial SA was set from 0 to 6, nothing else changed.
a5 got the main SA bias set to 0 from 20 and the table didn't refresh to new values
a4 has initial SA set at 6 (from 0 which is in a7) and main SA bias also set at 0 without the table refreshing.
a3 was just my initial eprom, nothing special
a2 has initial SA at 8
a1 has initial SA at 10
a0 has initial SA at 12
Now for the juicy stuff.
a7 would idle at 17.9 degrees, a6 at 12.7, a5 at 39.4, a4 at 33.8, a2 at 11.5, a1 at 8.8 and a0 at 7.
Everything checks out. The car was funny, it liked to idle at between 20 and 30 degrees of advance while in park. I'm going to have to reset my base timig for any of this to make more sence to people (and myself) but the car actually could idle at anything from 6 all the way up to the 39.4 degrees without knocking. It didn't stall when put it gear but the higher the advance the more it stumbled and the more the IAC had to step in (pun intended). Anybody have any guess as to what my base timing is at? I'm guessing it's gotta be really close to 0.
I'm going to refresh this post when I go and start messing around with the max SA constant, verifty my base timing, and verifty that my knock sensor works (it must, picks up about 4 to 10 when I crank the motor and no code 43 is ever set!)
So I hope this helps people understand a few things. 1, that tuning is such a PITA sometimes and 2, that it's just so cool when you've got gizmo's and gadgets to manipulate for that extra wow factor.

RBob

iTrader: (1)

Within the '8746 & '747 ECMs there is no real difference between
the inital SA and main SA bias. They both get subtracted from the
SA timing. When using Tunercat (as you mentioned) the main SA
bias gets sub'd from the displayed main SA table. So it pays to
set these values correctly.

When looking at the SA through a patched aldl table don't forget
to add the physical distributor initial (base) timing to the aldl
reported timing value for the at-the-crank timing.

RBob.