After talking with my dad I feel a little silly... he was an expert in serial and parallel communications... so the only reason Vikash was using a parallel port was because of the voltage... he's actually re-creating a driver for it so that he can use the strobe and select ports for data instead of the actual data ports, so in fact the ECU is using a serial protocol... just some weird IEEE spinoff. Is what my dad's saying. Man I wish he were here (with a scope).
But in that case, I'm going to have to go with Tom on this one. Vikash is using a really weird way of doing things, so it makes me wonder how the official monitor does it even more. strange and svxfiles could help out a lot in this part, and I know they probably already are.
Calum, I don't know how you got here at all. Google or something? But you really did come at a great time. Thank you for all you've provided us thusfar. I'm curious; would increasing the baud rate require soldering? Is that what you mean by "a bit more than changing code?" While connecting unknown wires and crushing beads in our ECUs is...easy enough... well I know I'm not confident enough to do serious hardware modding like that. I don't have a spare ECU sitting around in case I mess it up...
This thread is awesome. Aw darn, look at the time, gotta go to work.