How do I know that my car is running off the chip I burned, and not defaulting to the limp home chips?

 

You won't see the SES light come on.

Having a scan tool is a must also.

 

Thanks. I saw no SES light, and I have a scan tool. I noticed the idle and such were in the range programmed into the chip. That's good news. However the fans did not turn on @ the programmed temp I guess this is where the playing starts.

 

There are times when the ecm can go into a fail soft mode.
That's when it runs a default value for a malfunctioning sensor. Sometimes they have a long *error* time, and don't set a code or turn on the light, so you need to read thru all the scanners values to make sure they are ALL resonable.

 

The logic from "ECM to ECM" and "BIN to BIN" varies slightly, but in general I've found there is usually a small delay (20-45 seconds) along with the ECM detecting a temperature > than the desired Temp. Also, make sure you have hitting "FAN 1". But give it a little more time and a few more degrees, it should come on.

Even though you can set a temperature for Fan 2, and the ECM will "turn it on", their is no "wiring" from the ECM back to FAN 2 to allow this to happen. The Fan Switch in the Passenger Head controls all of this.

 

Looking @ the scan data everything looked normal. As noted idle speed was as programmed, and the BLM's were in the 32-136 range which would be right I guess. I have a 383 LPE motor. So, a other wise stock program would cause a lean condition (right)?
I've always heard the limp home chips will cause the car to run really rich? The reason I'm asking is I'm convertering to the 730 ECM, so I'm using the AT29c256 EPROMS. I've changed the start address to 04000 as I've read to do. This is what makes me question the chip

 

FWIW, I very recently installed Craig's adaptor and am also using the 29C256 chips in a 165 ECM. The first time I put the chip in I had it backwards and the car started on the (presumably) limp-home chips. It ran like absolute garbage - very obvious something was wrong.

Also, I doubled-up on the bin i.e. at the DOS prompt:

copy /b old.bin+old.bin=new.bin

where old.bin is the 16K file. This worked fine. You're probably OK.