Rogue-AE95 wrote:If you mean aftermarket ECUs in general, then what about a chipped Honda ECU? I know I bring it up a lot, but that's mostly because I'm seriously re-thinking about going that route for my 4A-GE.
My introduction to tuning was with Hondas and I am a Neptune dealer. While going the OBD-1 Honda route will get you probably a third of the way to a properly tuned car, and general tuning will get you that next third, I believe the limitations of the hardware will stop you there.
I'm not a big fan of OBD-1 Honda tuning software. Crome doesn't do bad. ECTune is probably better. I'm really not a big fan of MOST tuning software.
There's really no reason NOT to go megasquirt on a 4A-G. It handles everything a 4A is capable of just fine, and there's a whole gift basket of hardware depending on what your budget and involvement level is.
If you're not in the mood to do any assembly, there's the MegaSquirtPNP. You unplug your stock ECU and plug the MSPNP into your factory harness.
If you are comfortable with some assembly, or know someone who is, the DIYPNP is a good option. Directions are straight-forward. I can assemble them in an afternoon. At the end of assembly you have a PNP which plugs straight into your factory harness. An advantage of a DIYPNP over an MSPNP is flexibility and expandability in the future.
If for some reason you want new wiring, then you may want to look at doing a microsquirt. This was my introduction to MegaSquirt hardware. They're well packaged, capable, and inexpensive. A good stepping stone here may be a microsquirt and breakout box with the intention of doing a full rewiring down the road to ditch the breakout box, which is the method I used for my second 20v swap, as it came with a nice harness.
A similar option to the microsquirt would be the MS3-Pro, but the difference in price I don't feel warrants the difference in features with MS2-based hardware like the microsquirt. The MS3-Pro runs on MS3 hardware, which is VERY capable. I wouldn't dive straight into MS3 hardware, though, unless you have a tuner who's familiar with them.
If you are comfortable with both wiring and assembly you can go full megasquirt. I'm currently running a MegaSquirt 3 with MS3X on my Corolla, and have been steward to an MS3-Pro on the Southern Illinois University FSAE team's racecar. There are some easy ways to do some pretty cool things with MegaSquirt which would be both difficult and expensive with other hardware. I've been doing a lot of cool CAN Bus projects recently using Arduinos.