
Originally Posted by
Sparkie
So the typical toyota ecu from this era (well, more so earlier given my experience) is one microcontroller to run the engine, one microcontroller to run the transmission.
To validate some of this you can chase out the pins on the micro through some of the other components to the particular sensors and actuators on the engine. check the ecu pinout and find out what the injector and igniter outputs are, then follow them back (use a multimeter with a continuity beep). Inputs will likely be buffered by some resistors or an IC, outputs will be buffered by an IC or transistors. It helps the most if you're able to power up the computer on a desk and feed it some fake engine signals with a function generator, tracing out the inputs and outputs with an oscilloscope. You could also use the vehicle itself for this but thats significantly more cumbersome.
I recalled finding a subroutine once in these computers that read out an address given a request for one. that way they could build a scantool that just dumped data from the ecu. chances are that's what that port does.