Hi all,
In the planning phase of rebuilding my pink FD.. here's the situation

I want to retain the stock twins on the car (for now) to maintain a factory engine bay look and cut short term costs on my build
But the strange ECO-CPU that came in the car has been a dead end and I can't tune it (EEPRom, not flash memory... No datalogging either)
The tune on the ECU is probably part of the equation that lead to the death of the engine so I don't want to keep it.

As far as I know my options for this are as follows:

• PFC - Old tech, no failsafes, but plug and play and works good for a lot of people
• Adaptronic - slightly better, newer than a PFC, plug and play, and works with stock twins?
• OEM RHD ECU - Throwing an OEM $100 RHD ebay ecu in there just to get the car running as a sanity check and leave the ECU/harness/tuning stuff for later down the road

Here's my question, will plugging in an OEM RHD ECU into my car go as smoothly as I want it to? Do these old ECU's require any kind of programming to get it to recognize the car it's in?
Most of the stuff is analog and it's OBD1 so my rational brain wants to say it should be fine to just turn on the car and use it for break-in after an engine swap right? no programming in the VIN or anything like that?

 

Here is my noob knowledge and opinions (someone who knows more please add or correct). In 2021 there are four ECUs sold today that are plug and play with the stock FD wiring harness. They are Haltech, Adaptronic, Link (works with stock twins in a non sequential setup only) and PowerFC. It does not matter if the car is LHD or RHD what matters is that you buy the correct series (ex your car is 1992-95 you buy a S6 ecu, 96-98 S7 etc.). With your car being RHD most aftermarket ECUs will actually work better because all of those were developed in the RHD market. The stock computers on these cars are very rudimentary. You can easily pickup another stock ECU of your year RHD and it will work in your car.

Here is my biased opinion: I, like you started with a stock car and wanted to retain the twins; unsure if I would be keeping them forever or eventually going single turbo. I bought the PowerFC, because it can be bought cheap and resold for about the same price you bought it for. For $900 I got a perfectly working PowerFC, black box Datalogit, OLED commander, and TurboJeff PFC mount. With a wideband, boost controller, and FC Tweak I can do all of the tuning I need to myself. I have a friend who is running this same setup on a single turbo semi PP engine, tuning it himself using HP Academy and FC Tweak. It was easy to install. Using Dale Clark's write up on Banzai's website I had the stock ECU out and the new one running in 45 minutes (30 minutes of the car teaching itself how to idle).

There are many options out there and you are really going to have to do some digging. The problem I see with other ECUs is that after a couple years a new one comes out and no body wants to buy the old one. If you look in the classifieds, newer than the PFC, late model ECUs (haltech platinum sport, AEM EMS) will sit forever without anyone buying them. PFCs get gone fast.

 

Thanks steve, this pretty comprehensively answers everything I wanted to know for the time being.
As soon as I read this I sniped a $40 JDM RHD ECU off ebay and will be taking things one step at a time.
Once the car is known to run the way it was meant to from the factory I'll start thinking about building at that point.
This seems like the best approach for me because I don't want to lather on variables and points of failure while so many things have to come apart and come back together.

 

Almost feel bad about starting a whole thread for this answer because I was able to easily search up everything besides my inquiry about whether a factory ECU from another car will plug-in and work with no issues which was what I really needed to know.

 

The haltech elite 2500 can do it. I'm running it with sequential twins. It's certainly not the cheapest way to go about it, but it is the most robust in terms of data logging and general ease of tuning/use over the PFC.

 

yes you can, these ecus have no security features and very little learning, so as long as you pick the one that fit s the car, 92-95 JDM, you're good to go

 

In my opinion the most important thing is to go with an ecu that your tuner is comfortable with. A Power FC is perfectly fine for a moderately modified car. The downside like you said is no failsafes. If your hardware and tune are solid, and you are the type of person who monitors what is going on it will do the job and be cost effective. A stock ecu will not safely handle more than 2 mods (catback and downpipe for example) and the piggyback with the stock ecu is more than likely why you blew the motor. My personal vote is for a Haltech Elite 2500. Also, unless you have a brand new harness I would not run any ecu plug and play. The ecu is only as good as the harness and an old, brittle engine harness has been the cause of infinite problems in these cars. A custom harness is a much better option.

 

Thank you everyone for the input.

Would anyone advise against using the factory ECU for break-in period and then circling back around to selecting a modern ECU replacement once the car is sorted?
My engine swap plan is to just throw a bone stock new mazda 13b rew block in. To give an idea of the mods (or lack thereof) I'd be running below is a simple picture..

The reason I want to start with a factory ECU is to mitigate short term costs and eliminate variables that could go wrong as the car is coming back together.

 

If you stay out of boost and have stock fuel, solenoids, and all emissions components in place you can get away with the stock ecu. If you start changing/removing some of these it may put you in limp mode with the stock ecu.