LS engine tuning

[Tails]

HP Tuners isn't tied to a VIN per se. Your software is tied to your serial # of your dongle and the make/model/year of your PCM. The credits you buy go towards the year of the car or PCM you have. Take for instance my license file I can edit and 1999, 2000, 2002 FBody PCMs, 04-05 GTO's. Get the picture?

Also take note. I don't know which interface you have. Either the USB or the EIO interface. The older USB interface will no longer be supported by HPTuners come Sept 30th 2009. That means you will no longer be able to purchase licenses for that interface. You will have to upgrade to the EIO interface which uses a "credit" based system. Much easier and efficient when it comes to purchasing licenses IMO..

I've been using HPTuners for about 5 years now to tune my cars along with friends hotrods. Pretty cool. Have fun with it. Read, read, read. And when you get tired read somemore before you dive headfirst into the editor and make changes. The helpfile has grown alot with the latest release. Also make sure visit their forum. Lots of good info there: http://www.hptuners.com/forum/
Most of all have fun and make one change at a time..

Tails

[Plums]

Yes there is a way to program a new PCM without any special equipment.

LS1's can be tuned in real time, but at this stage you can't tune the 6 litre's in real time. As Sideshow mentioned, they have to be done the old fashioned way; switch the car off, flash in the program, then start the process again.

The only difference between a normal MAFless tune and a "proper MAFless tune" (or SD Enhanced option) is the ability to retain the dual spark table functionality.
Personally, I always enable the SD enhanced option on MAFless cars. Is it essential? Definitely not.
Just so everybody knows, there is a lot more to a MAFless tune than just removing the MAF and turning off the MAF DTC. I'll leave it at that.

As Sideshow quite rightly mentioned, you need to know what you are doing with the software. Hopefully, I can help the people who take the plunge and give it a go themselves. I will attempt to write up "how to's" on this forum, and where possible I'll even send programs to people that will get them very close to the final product, with just minor tweaking required. I did this for "Ledge" from this forum, and his car had a fully built motor, large cam and even individual throttle bodies.....