With the ease of creating your own chips, I am surprised at how hard it is to find .bin and .xdf files for Motronic E30's.
The software is free (winOLS/Tunerpro/etc), the EPROMs burners are inexpensive ($50-80) and come with their own burning software and EPROM Chips are $2-5 each.
Back when our cars were new, the task would have been much more tedious; everything is in hex, you have to manually burn the hex codes one by one, no internet to reference, etc.
But come on folks, its been 30 years, we have the internet, peer reviewing and can approach tuning in an open source kind of way.
First point of clarity: The actual tuning part has a steep learning curve, but the access to maps, copying and burning chips is fairly simple.
Second point of clarity: EPROMs do not have encryption, and as such a chip can be reproduced for essentially the cost of a new chip ($2-5).
*Important*
There are numerous tuners, including on this forum who make tuning chips as a form of income. They are good at what they do, and this repository shouldn't contain their .bin files unless they consent to their distribution.
Lets cover some basics for folks who may want to get into burning their own chips or into light tuning.
.XDF files are essentially definition files that tuning software like tunerpro uses to decode the HEX code found on the chip to make it readable (separates specific tuning parameters and maps for editing).
.XDF files are specific to the Motronic version (not the car), therefore an XDF that was made for example for motronic 1.3 should work for all 1.3 chips found in any car that utilized motronic 1.3.
For an E30 that would mean that an .XDF file made for 1.3 would work for ECU's ending in 173, 380, 382, 524, 525, 526, etc.
Likewise an XDF made for 1.1 would work with 153, and 1.0 would work with 073, 081.
XDF files are made by individuals and thus vary in completeness or accuracy, and may not define the full Hex range found on the chip.
.bin/.ori files are the actual code images of the chips.
When loading a bin into a program like tunerpro it is important to make sure the XDF you are using was made for the version of motronic you are looking to edit.
How can you help?
To build the repository there are two different ways we can harvest .bin files
1. Copying our existing chips
You can buy your own hardware or send them to me and I can create the bin files (PM me for address).
2. Finding existing bins we may have on our computers over the last 30 years or we have found on other forums or mediums
At minimum my hope is that we would be able to get a stock bin file for every E30 ECU so we can cross reference the HEX to see if there were any factory differences between ECU's (particularly in the same motronics version family).
From there to collect as many .bin and .xdf tuner files as we can!
Feel free to host your own files to link here, or you can PM me and I can upload them on my site for hosting.
My contribution:
380 STOCK ECU BIN
Motronic 1.3 XDF
153 STOCK ECU BIN
173 STOCK ECU BIN
A couple of the bins and XDF above are from Tunerpro's website, the 380 ECU I found elsewhere.
I have yet to find a good Motronic 1.1 XDF.
For those interested in viewing the HEX of the BIN codes in their raw form you can use:
I did a little bit of research between the 173 and 380 ECU to see if there any HEX differences and it looks to be nearly identical in-so-far as the XDF is capable:
However there are some ~4000 differences in the byte spaces that are not defined by the XDF.
Hopefully with more XDF's we can figure out what these remaining bytes contain.
The software is free (winOLS/Tunerpro/etc), the EPROMs burners are inexpensive ($50-80) and come with their own burning software and EPROM Chips are $2-5 each.
Back when our cars were new, the task would have been much more tedious; everything is in hex, you have to manually burn the hex codes one by one, no internet to reference, etc.
But come on folks, its been 30 years, we have the internet, peer reviewing and can approach tuning in an open source kind of way.
First point of clarity: The actual tuning part has a steep learning curve, but the access to maps, copying and burning chips is fairly simple.
Second point of clarity: EPROMs do not have encryption, and as such a chip can be reproduced for essentially the cost of a new chip ($2-5).
*Important*
There are numerous tuners, including on this forum who make tuning chips as a form of income. They are good at what they do, and this repository shouldn't contain their .bin files unless they consent to their distribution.
Lets cover some basics for folks who may want to get into burning their own chips or into light tuning.
.XDF files are essentially definition files that tuning software like tunerpro uses to decode the HEX code found on the chip to make it readable (separates specific tuning parameters and maps for editing).
.XDF files are specific to the Motronic version (not the car), therefore an XDF that was made for example for motronic 1.3 should work for all 1.3 chips found in any car that utilized motronic 1.3.
For an E30 that would mean that an .XDF file made for 1.3 would work for ECU's ending in 173, 380, 382, 524, 525, 526, etc.
Likewise an XDF made for 1.1 would work with 153, and 1.0 would work with 073, 081.
XDF files are made by individuals and thus vary in completeness or accuracy, and may not define the full Hex range found on the chip.
.bin/.ori files are the actual code images of the chips.
When loading a bin into a program like tunerpro it is important to make sure the XDF you are using was made for the version of motronic you are looking to edit.
How can you help?
To build the repository there are two different ways we can harvest .bin files
1. Copying our existing chips
You can buy your own hardware or send them to me and I can create the bin files (PM me for address).
2. Finding existing bins we may have on our computers over the last 30 years or we have found on other forums or mediums
At minimum my hope is that we would be able to get a stock bin file for every E30 ECU so we can cross reference the HEX to see if there were any factory differences between ECU's (particularly in the same motronics version family).
From there to collect as many .bin and .xdf tuner files as we can!
Feel free to host your own files to link here, or you can PM me and I can upload them on my site for hosting.
My contribution:
380 STOCK ECU BIN
Motronic 1.3 XDF
153 STOCK ECU BIN
173 STOCK ECU BIN
A couple of the bins and XDF above are from Tunerpro's website, the 380 ECU I found elsewhere.
I have yet to find a good Motronic 1.1 XDF.
For those interested in viewing the HEX of the BIN codes in their raw form you can use:
I did a little bit of research between the 173 and 380 ECU to see if there any HEX differences and it looks to be nearly identical in-so-far as the XDF is capable:
However there are some ~4000 differences in the byte spaces that are not defined by the XDF.
Hopefully with more XDF's we can figure out what these remaining bytes contain.
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