Tuning Community and regulations... merged

dschultz · **Posted:** Fri Apr 22, 2022 5:24 pm

NoizeMaykr wrote:

Yup. That was my bible back in 2013/2014.

However, we'll need something more aligned to creation of new definitions (how to pull ROM's, parse the data, etc). That's not nearly as simple and the information is just kind of helter-skelter everywhere.

Like here: viewforum.php?f=40

NoizeMaykr · **Joined:** Tue Apr 19, 2022 5:11 pm **Posts:** 4

Yup! Perfect example of what I said.

EDIT: Remember Unabomber Manifestos from NASIOC? Something like that would do a world of good here. Here are some good jumping off points, but we'll need more around undefined ROM's if we're going to start building out resources for the tens of thousands of VA owners who could eventually find their way here - myself included.

viewtopic.php?t=8449
viewtopic.php?t=6303
(no idea what happened here) viewtopic.php?f=8&t=11186
viewtopic.php?t=10538
viewtopic.php?t=10640

I'm not trying to call anybody's baby ugly here - but this is a pretty darn good opportunity. Recognize that people are going to come in with almost zero knowledge (I'm talking "What is a ROM?" level knowledge) but a lot of energy and eagerness to help. Some will even have prior tuning experience in RomRaider for older ECU's like me. I'd like to help by defining new ROM's for the VA chassis so there's a hook for the newbies.

I just donated $50, btw... I want this project to take off more than it already has.

thecross · **Joined:** Tue Apr 19, 2022 7:35 pm **Posts:** 2

dschultz wrote:

Anyone registered here is free to fill in the knowledge gap and write or update a How-To. Let us know about the out-of-date articles and we can remove them of maybe update them.
The wiki pages are best for multi-user contributions to documentation: https://www.romraider.com/index.php/Doc ... umentation

Thank you for a link to the documentation. At this point I'm doing a lot of digging to find what is supported, what that looks like. Ethanol and differential fuel pressure sensors, speed density, analog wideband fed into rear O2 for easy logging. Everything runs great today and has been like that for years but obviously that's no longer maintainable without major hardware or software changes. Cobb has what I thought was well organized documentation in their Atlassian/Wiki area. I bet the equivalent information exists here but will clearly take more than zero effort on my part to piece together.

Abomination · **Posted:** Sun Apr 24, 2022 7:36 am

NoizeMaykr wrote:

Yup! Perfect example of what I said.

EDIT: Remember Unabomber Manifestos from NASIOC? Something like that would do a world of good here. Here are some good jumping off points, but we'll need more around undefined ROM's if we're going to start building out resources for the tens of thousands of VA owners who could eventually find their way here - myself included.

viewtopic.php?t=8449
viewtopic.php?t=6303
(no idea what happened here) viewtopic.php?f=8&t=11186
viewtopic.php?t=10538
viewtopic.php?t=10640

I'm not trying to call anybody's baby ugly here - but this is a pretty darn good opportunity. Recognize that people are going to come in with almost zero knowledge (I'm talking "What is a ROM?" level knowledge) but a lot of energy and eagerness to help. Some will even have prior tuning experience in RomRaider for older ECU's like me. I'd like to help by defining new ROM's for the VA chassis so there's a hook for the newbies.

I just donated $50, btw... I want this project to take off more than it already has.

VA owner here.

I was hesitant to post. I've been researching options for a 2019 STI. My shop said open source tuning my car is limited. It has Cobb's V3 flex kit installed. I dug around this website. I'd like to help add support for flex on newer models. New flex kits that no longer go through the TGVs are in development. I still want to move away from Cobb's proprietary software.

solidxsnake · **Joined:** Tue Jan 05, 2016 11:27 pm **Posts:** 64

NoizeMaykr wrote:

Yup! Perfect example of what I said.

EDIT: Remember Unabomber Manifestos from NASIOC? Something like that would do a world of good here. Here are some good jumping off points, but we'll need more around undefined ROM's if we're going to start building out resources for the tens of thousands of VA owners who could eventually find their way here - myself included.

viewtopic.php?t=8449
viewtopic.php?t=6303
(no idea what happened here) viewtopic.php?f=8&t=11186
viewtopic.php?t=10538
viewtopic.php?t=10640

I'm not trying to call anybody's baby ugly here - but this is a pretty darn good opportunity. Recognize that people are going to come in with almost zero knowledge (I'm talking "What is a ROM?" level knowledge) but a lot of energy and eagerness to help. Some will even have prior tuning experience in RomRaider for older ECU's like me. I'd like to help by defining new ROM's for the VA chassis so there's a hook for the newbies.

I just donated $50, btw... I want this project to take off more than it already has.

Tuning is much more accessible and easy to write guides for than ROM disassembly and hacking; it can be boiled down to steps and procedures. Log some parameters, follow some steps, do some math, and iterate.

IMO, reliable reverse-engineering is something that you can only really "teach" to someone with some pre-requisite background (e.g. computer engineering). A how-to guide for disassembling a ROM targeted towards someone starting from the question "what is a ROM?" really just boils down to writing a textbook. The ECU Analysis forum has enough information to help people define tables that are easily found and identified, even without a CE background. The tables that can be defined via a reasonably straight-forward procedure are all documented in that forum. Unfortunately, often times it's not as simple as a straight-forward procedure, and that's where some prior knowledge/experience and intuition is invaluable, if not straight-up necessary. And sometimes the documented procedures will lead you astray. Sometimes, minor code changes between model years can totally muck up the documented procedure to discover the location of a table in the ROM, for example.

I certainly agree that the info could be compiled slightly better, perhaps even just linking to some of the top-level how-to threads in the RR Wiki, but I don't think it's feasible to expect getting useful work out of folks with zero knowledge about computer architecture, no matter how eager they are. I think the recently opened bounty forums are the most useful thing for this particular problem.

Puddles · **Posted:** Sat Apr 30, 2022 6:20 am

dschultz wrote:

Anyone registered here is free to fill in the knowledge gap...

This is something I've been curious about, but never bothered to actually look into. More-so due to not knowing exactly who's responsibility it was or if there was any protocols around what was included.

I'm assuming that any wiki articles would be an aggregation of information from forum posts? Would any forum post qualify to have information included providing it was relevant? Is external information allowed/should it be referenced?
Basically, are there any considerations that need to be made?..

I'd be interested in tidying up articles and/or writing new ones in my spare time if it's something worth contributing to.

dschultz · **Posted:** Sat Apr 30, 2022 8:04 am

I would expect the wiki to follow the same rules as forum posts.

Referencing relevant forum posts or re-writing post contents into the wiki to update the content would be fine if credit to the original author is maintained.
Links to external reference resources is okay.

nsfw · **Joined:** Wed Nov 22, 2006 10:23 pm **Posts:** 2565

It would probably be good to create Ghidra versions of the IDA utilities the dschultz mentioned in the "how to define a ROM" post. If you're fairly new at software and reverse engineering is intimidating, porting those tools to Ghidra would be a great project. It would take a lot less time than creating a definition for a ROM and it would create tools that I think a lot of people would find valuable.

Ghidra wasn't available back in 2012 but it's free now. I'll admit I haven't switched to it myself, but I think it's probably a better tool than IDA, especially for anyone who is just getting started. Partly because of the price and partly because of the decompiler.

If you have a background in software, you can do the reverse ngineering too. It mostly just takes a lot of hours, to sort through the code, to find the needles in the haystack.

If you don't have a background in software, reverse engineering is a way to get one. Finding the base of this SSM table is just a matter of following the instructions in dschultz's post. Finding the RAM addresses that all of the SSM functions use only requires learning a little bit of assembly language.

Then you use IDA or Ghidra to find the code that uses those RAM addresses, and use a bit of assembly understanding to figure out whether it's reading or writing. That alone can give you some hints about what's happening in the code.

Then you find the functions that do table lookups. Then you can start labeling tables based on what the input parameters are (based on the memory locations that are read before doing the lookup) and based on what the output parameters are (based on the memory location that gets written with the result of the table lookup).

You basically just keep at it, and you keep on finding places where your guesses were wrong and finding places where your guesses were right, until you're confident about those guesses.

rimwall · **Joined:** Fri Aug 21, 2020 6:05 am **Posts:** 315

Not sure if this is what you had in mind... some tools have been ported to Ghidra java scripts and are available in the 7z file attached to this thread: https://www.romraider.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=17796

The tools are:
- MakeCELPointers.java
- MakeTablePointers.java
- WalkTheROM.java
- XmlToGhidra.cs

Abomination · **Posted:** Thu May 12, 2022 10:40 pm

nsfw wrote:

It would probably be good to create Ghidra versions of the IDA utilities the dschultz mentioned in the "how to define a ROM" post. If you're fairly new at software and reverse engineering is intimidating, porting those tools to Ghidra would be a great project. It would take a lot less time than creating a definition for a ROM and it would create tools that I think a lot of people would find valuable.

Ghidra wasn't available back in 2012 but it's free now. I'll admit I haven't switched to it myself, but I think it's probably a better tool than IDA, especially for anyone who is just getting started. Partly because of the price and partly because of the decompiler.

If you have a background in software, you can do the reverse engineering too. It mostly just takes a lot of hours, to sort through the code, to find the needles in the haystack.

If you don't have a background in software, reverse engineering is a way to get one. Finding the base of this SSM table is just a matter of following the instructions in dschultz's post. Finding the RAM addresses that all of the SSM functions use only requires learning a little bit of assembly language.

Then you use IDA or Ghidra to find the code that uses those RAM addresses, and use a bit of assembly understanding to figure out whether it's reading or writing. That alone can give you some hints about what's happening in the code.

Then you find the functions that do table lookups. Then you can start labeling tables based on what the input parameters are (based on the memory locations that are read before doing the lookup) and based on what the output parameters are (based on the memory location that gets written with the result of the table lookup).

You basically just keep at it, and you keep on finding places where your guesses were wrong and finding places where your guesses were right, until you're confident about those guesses.

I've never dabbled with vehicle software. Computer programming is a different story altogether. Knowing where to start is the biggest hurdle.

RomRaider

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