well i didn't update this thread as i have been insanely busy - working on it, tuning in general, and everything else in life.... but not too long after getting into it, i realized how horrendous the source code was. not to speak badly of the original creator - as it was quite an impressive feat to have created this himself - but as a programmer (or used to be at least), i'm rather perplexed and somewhat surprised that he was able to get working at all seeing what a bloated, convoluted, mess of unmanageable spaghetti code it is...
it took a while to get through it all and figure out how it all worked, partly due to my very rusty programmer-brain and learning the subtle differences between c# and c++. it was difficult to get to the point where i could see what i needed to do to adapt it to work with edc16. through the help of some others, i've also figured out more about the file structure of edc15-edc17, damos and a2l formats and the information stored in them. as i delved into it more, the scope of what i wanted to do vastly increased - i now want to create a much more general purpose ecu binary viewer/editor/manager. something that should work on at least all bosch ecus with the help of relatively simple coding extensions. so it's going to be designed to (hopefully) be easily extended to work with the subtleties of various ecu types, but initially focused on getting edc16 working. edc15 and edc17 should follow very quickly. i would then like to see it extended to work with bosch gasser ecus.
so, no offense intended to him - i'm very impressed he created this on his own and by releasing it as open source, has opened the doors for others like myself to learn from it. however, the source code is completely unmanageable, convoluted, bloated, poorly written, inefficient in all respects, difficult to read, illogical in many parts, essentially non-object oriented but written in c# - to do what i want, there's no other way other than to start from scratch, using his code as a guide now, mostly just for the gui interface and graphing parts. my gui creating skills were very rusty - not since college had i done any similar gui programming in c++.
i've thought about this a lot, but it's going to be FAR too much work for me to release as open source for free, i believe. maybe if i were independently wealthy i would, but i'm far from that, lol.. the volume of work and amount of coding is simply going to be too much. as much as i believe in open source, i just don't think i can afford to do that in this situation.
i also learned a little bit of history along the way - the path i've ended up on sounds almost exactly the same as the path DarkAngelBOV took - who now has created edc-suite.net, which up until recently i didn't even know existed. it seemss like he had wanted to improve the original source code to do more, but soon realized it was impossible and had to be re-written from scratch, and that it was going to be way too much work to release open source.
i don't have any experience with copy protection in software and only a basic idea of how to do it, but i'm sure i will figure something out.
i what i would probably do, assuming i can get it working, is provide a few different versions.
1) free demo version that lets you do everything except save out, similar to winols demo
2) cheaper limited versions
3) full version
anyone who can significantly help me with a2l/damos file acquisition (or any other useful aspects, since there are still a number of things i need to figure out) would certainly get a free full version, and could get test versions to play with as soon as i get something that will compile and actually run. right now, i'm still having trouble getting files for the most common north american tdi's. i may have them already, but i haven't had the time to wade through all the files yet..