Miller War Chip tunes.

[doktor_b]

I was looking at the WAR chip as a way to accommodate my current mods and the mods i have planned. I have very specific long-term goals, and was hoping that the WAR chip would allow me the flexibility to tune at home (or dyno) as i MAKE new parts without the mess/hassle of MS.

as a new e30 owner, i've been extremely pleased with the community up to this point. however, this thread is disheartening. the e30 community is so developed and has done so by sharing information and empirical data. it seems out of place to read this whole thread, expecting valuable information and insight, and finding bickering and selfishness.

i'm not quite ready for the WAR chip & MAF conversion just now. (i've only had the e30 for 6 days) but before the end of the summer, i will have to make some kind of decision about management and ridding myself of this horrid AFM. I'm hoping to keep reading/studying/learning as much as i'm physically able to in the interim. I'm hoping some of the WAR guys come around by then.

[bimm3r82]

I am new to the miller war chip and I gotta say I like it.. Im just a novice at tuning and I hope this thread will prove to be beneficial and that we can share tunes on here.. Once I educate myself better on tuning I am definitely going to share away.. It would be awesome to get some good tunes on here for everybody..

[TurboJake]

I'm just going to pop in here and say I have had zero problems running the war software on Windows 7, using the free VMWare player as a virtual machine with an XP installation on there.

Works a treat.
That said, I like my war chip. However I'd really like much more functionality and openness about it. That, and for my damn check engine light to not have a mind of its own when there's nothing actually wrong. I'm not willing to pay a dime more for another one (Black edition), when the product should have not had that issue to begin with.

[brody]

Screenshots work, but you still don't get the load and RPM settings. They are specific to the mpc file and you cannot change them in the WAR software. It makes me very frustrated when seeing screenshots of "good tunes" but I cant acutally use the data because the tune has different load settings. I believe this is the only thing that holds WAR back from being comparable to a MS.

It's important that people are willing to share their tune files. Screenshots are great to figure out how the maps should be smoothed out, but the load settings is what drives me crazy. -- If Miller wont support us on it, I believe the Miller community should be allowed to.

We are working on our V3 software. It will be plenty more stable an will allow for things like load and RPM scaling to take place. We've finally found a solid developer who know both cars and JAVA programming. The new software should be ready in a month or two more.

[brody]

i cant tell you how disapointed I've been with Miller performance. Sad thing is it was one of the things i was most looking forward to bolting on when I was building up my 2.8 stroker.

First, i order the MAF and chip. my maf was the 3.0 as per their recomendations for a 2.8 with 19# injectors. of course, they dont make an adapter with the 3" so keeping my airbox means that i will have to frankenstein it to make it work with my box, which i later did. After waiting over a week with no email or phone calls, I call them to see where my shipment is. The guy I got on the phone said, "oh yea our sensors have been on back order, sorry" not a phone call, email, nothing. took damn near 3 weeks to get my stuff.

Then, I finally get my MAF/chip installed motor, runs like poo. call miller, "oh yea that chip wont work with the 3" MAF you need the WAR." Well why did you sell it to me is what i was thinking, but fair enough. I shell out more money for the WAR. Of cousre the guy who always answers the phone is not the one i want to talk to. I always ask for Brody, but he is never available or too busy.

Finally, I get my wideband O2 sensor on, ready to do some street tuning to ge the fuel dialed in. my lap top has windows 7. WAR will only work with windows XP, not windows 7. Ok maybe i can just set it to run in XP mode. Oh no, I only have the 64bit home premium version, so i cant use XP mode. at least thats where im at now. unless any one has any tips, i need to get a better version of windows 7, so i can run windows XP mode, so i can tune my damn Miller software. Which i paid a pretty penny for i might add.

Bottom line is that i thought this was a company that was very close to the enthusiast community, but it just seems that around every corner i have been disapointed with their product and customer service. Now it seems that they frown upon customers sharing tunes that they make, wow, shameful. they sent me my WAR chip with a tune that was from a ireland motor which had 9:1 pistons and what not just to get me started. I guess its better than nothing but my motor has 10:1 MM pistons and head work and what not, so Im currently stuck with what ive got it seems. Sure would be nice if they would get back to the community and make things right. I think they could be a great company. As it stands I am very disapointed.

Sorry if this sounds more like a feedback thread kind of thing but I just was reading through this and had to voice.

Arron,

Please email me directly. I don't deal with the phones at all anymore since I can't get anything done with people always wanting to talk to me. We have been having a tough time over the last 6 months. The "economy" finally caught up with us it seemed but we have struggled through it and are now back on track.

Anyway, we don't care if people share tunes, that what the WAR Chip is all about. What we do care about is our site being hacked, blacklisted and the possibility of having personal data stolen. We scrapped the WAR Room not because of enthusiasts hacking us, but because of lames ass hats from Russia and Asia attacking the crap out of our site through vulnerabilities in the program we used for the WAR Room. Long and short, waking up once a week to see the website destroyed with a cute little "you've been hacked by..." message got old real quick.

It is clearly stated everywhere that you must use WINDOWS XP. There is a 3" MAF chip we offer and the person you were speaking with is learning all the little details about the "rare" stuff people order.

The Stroker Tune you would have been given is based on the IE kit which is 10:1 Compression.

Anyway, I don't answer or deal with phone calls anymore simply because I have too many other priorities. I do answer emails though.

[DmcL]

at one stage i was thinking about getting in on millers business by offering to tweak tunes for people with WAR chips but never bothered in the end up, had too much else on.

diego, setup and installation of the hardware is extremely easy. where it gets technical is after that when you need to either find, buy or make a definition file for your ECU to get you up and tuning. i have been selling definitions for tunerpro for some time because although i do help people out who want to learn how to make definitions themselves they end up just paying for one because it would be basically like jumping into computer programming head first trying to make your own definition.

there are alot of definitions freely available online and in tunerpro's downloads section but a definition is only as good as the person who made it so without a trustworthy source maps could be mis-labelled, have wrong RPM labels, have the wrong conversion formula applied to map data, be missing maps or functions that you need, etc, etc. i charge a fair price for making a definition from scratch but once i have one made for a particular ECU i sell copies for much less. i also give honest advice to people so if they dont need to spend loads i will tell then that, not really great business practice i suppose but i got into selling from tuning my own stuff and helping out others wanting to tune their own on e30tech, tunerpro forum, ecuproject and some other sites so i sort of think of it more like helping people out with a bit of money making on the side for people who are lazy or havent got the time to learn all this stuff lol

[E Verty]

As for sharing tunes, I have a dropbox account with lots of room on it. I have most of the stock tunes available from the Miller downloads on it, and the modified ones I have for my Turbo project.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/fzmxjjadzqwmcd7/bJpyrZFMmo

[E Verty]

Yeah the WAR room was closed a while ago. I spoke with Alex from Miller and he said it was shut down due people trying to "hack their site through it".

The packages they sell don't teach people how to tune, they simply give you the tools to do it. I would really like to see a nicely sorted, semi-private tune bank with people sharing their .mpc files. Its not as if you can actually read or use them unless you own the WAR software anyways.

For example, Adobe can't get legal at you for sending someone a PDF you created using their software-- as long as it is licensed. If you illegally downloaded the software to create the document, that's when you get into trouble... Right?

[diegom6]

I guess by sharing the tunes, the file can be send through a email and be done? Is not like there is a specific server that load and download the tunes from there for free...

nando, sounds good about the MS3Pro and all, but honestly I won't go stand alone route again, not interest on it either the time to mess up with all, enough with the Miller WAR or alike stuff.

Dmcl, thanks for the explanation. There is any DIY guide how is being installed,/tuning process, etc for our DME's¿?

[nando]

I think they were referencing the WAR room, which was a private area for trading tunes, and AFAIK it's been closed for quite some time.

[E Verty]

Ok for everyone saying " Miller Doesn't want people sharing tunes"

https://www.millerperformancecars.com/war-chip.html

Check out the " Top 5 Reasons for Getting a War Chip"

5. Share tunes!
Share your tunes with other WAR Chip users! Thats right, if you have made a custom version of a tune for you specific application, you can share that with other WAR Chip users who might have a very similar set up.

Thats directly from the Miller website. Lets start sharing!

[DmcL]

from what i gather the WAR chip is essentially just a higher capacity chip that can store up to 4 or 5 tunes.. you can make something along those lines, again for far less.. here i am using a 27c512 chip instead of a 27c256 so i have twice the space and can store 2 tunes and switch between them via a small toggle switch. this is how i did the launch control.. two identical tunes on this device but one had fuelling cut at a certain area to hold the revs in that area.

switch in down position = my normal tune, switch in up position = launch control tune. thats how i activated/deactivated the LC setup. you can see if the revs are over or around 3k RPM once i switch the switch to the up position the revs drop into the launch control area where i cut fuelling to make a nice area that will catch the revs and hold them unless pressing the throttle like half way down or more to snap it out of that area of the maps.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOcoUHds8Rk

the ostrich is not like the WAR chip, id only stores one tune at a time but allows real time tuning and map tracing for activity. yes you can mess alot up tuning in tunerpro but in my experience there are only a handful of maps you actually need to tune, everything else you dont touch.. or if you buy an XDF file from someone ask them only for the maps you will need to tune so you cant mess anything up.. all you really need is full throttle maps, part throttle maps, idle maps, cranking maps and maybe a few trimming type maps like ICV control, AFM maps and whatever else. there are more limitations with millers stuff than with the no holds barred, no training wheels attached method of tuning the stock ECU via tunerpro and ostrich. the only gimmick you miss out on is the 4-5 tune switchable crap miller gives you with the WAR chip.. but as you have seen you can make something to swap between 2 tunes easily, you could make a setup to swap between as many as millers WAR chip but wiring would be different as you would need a larger capacity chip, possibly a different type of chip also. it could be done though.

diego, basically all you need to do hardware wise is remove the stock chip and plug the ostrich into the socket in its place. you can then plug a laptop into the ostrich via USB and upload tunes, tune in real time, etc, etc. takes like 5 minutes to install the ostrich, just pushes into the socket like a normal chip would.

[nando]

It's a similar idea as the WAR chip. It emulates the 8-bit memory chip and you can write to it with a cable.

has some of the same limitations, but there's also a larger community built around it.

on the other hand, there's more to screw up since you can write to any area in the chip, not just fuel/ignition maps.

if it were me Diego, with a motor like that - I'd get an MS3pro unit from DIYautotune.com. It's not really anything like the MS you've used in the past - for one, you don't have to solder it together (it's all SMD), and it supports everything a high dollar S14 would need and more out of the box. The tuning software is also far better than almost everything else out there (megatune is long dead and buried!).

MS3pro finally ditched the DB37 connector for some real automotive grade connectors - actually, they're the same connectors as a $2000+ DTA S100.

http://www.diyautotune.com/catalog/ms3pro-c-82.html?osCsid=89cd264c7ed076fd6e1d0d33582ac0ed

[diegom6]

miller most likely dont want people sharing tunes because people will figure out that they dont need an expensive shiny looking MAF kit and a WAR chip with training wheels software. anything they can do to your tune that you cant plus all the stuff you can do to your WAR tunes and then some can all be done for less.. also i dont know if millers war chip allows you to trace maps to see where the ECU is reading while the the cars running, moates ostrich 2.0 emulator is like $175 and will store a tune, allow tuning in real time with engine running and also map tracing.. and it works with a nice little program for tuning that also happens to be free.

http://www.tunerpro.net/

https://www.moates.net/ostrich-20-the-new-breed-p-169.html?cPath=95

all you really need to have full control over your stock ECU.

I bought two WAR-MAF kit for a customer e30 M3 and one for my own e30 M3 (mine is not installed and looking for another alternative). Customer's M3 has a rebuilded 2.5L and had to go custom tunning due the cams installed and not chip available for such combo, therefore the WAR+MAF was the "wise" chocie.
I had-have lot of problems with it, not because is kinda hard to tune, change the values at your own guess where in the map, save & write and see if it worked out the way you wanted, but because I had a grembling/damon in that system that change the behavior sometimes by itself and what not...thigns that I can't figure out what's wrong and I had a bit of experiencing with MS in the past, as well with Haltech, that means that I know a tad of this ECU-EFI world but no expert at all.

Now you link these two cool devices (program and module). I have read about this Moates Ostrich stuff in the past but never investigated it.

Could you tell me more how exactly works? Do I need to pull out my chip of the DME , somehow bridge it to this module and bench tune it? Or it does somehow plug (wiring the stuff) into the DME to intercept while being installed-connected to the carit and have the option to tune the DME in live with tracing on the map fields so I can now where the engine is at, just like the standalone ECU?

Thanks

[DmcL]

miller most likely dont want people sharing tunes because people will figure out that they dont need an expensive shiny looking MAF kit and a WAR chip with training wheels software. anything they can do to your tune that you cant plus all the stuff you can do to your WAR tunes and then some can all be done for less.. also i dont know if millers war chip allows you to trace maps to see where the ECU is reading while the the cars running, moates ostrich 2.0 emulator is like $175 and will store a tune, allow tuning in real time with engine running and also map tracing.. and it works with a nice little program for tuning that also happens to be free.

http://www.tunerpro.net/

https://www.moates.net/ostrich-20-the-new-breed-p-169.html?cPath=95

all you really need to have full control over your stock ECU.