After having my acme pinnacle / hexmods vb / frankster centre bushes heavily modified and built 5eat in my audm liberty for some time now, I will be biting the bullet and swapping to a 6 speed manual in a few weeks.
I absolutely love the 5eat and has been handling my 550whp 520ftlb of torque very well without a hitch. However for my intended circuit racing use, the 6mt just makes more sense (which absolutely pains me to say because of how much I love my 5eat). I'm sure I could've tried an aftermarket tcu etc to override the downshift limitation of the factory tcu for track (my main pain point and motivator for going manual), but wanted to try the 6 speed in any event
One thing I can confirm for sure - I had 3 ecu's sent to Tactrix for bench unbricking a couple of years back. One was auto two were manual ecu's. All had auto roms flashed onto them after unbricking, so this confirms flashing an auto rom onto manual ecu does not brick and vice versa.
I will be removing the tcu and flashing a manual rom onto my auto ecu when I do this - will report back if the high speed CAN error disappears
I also have a manual cluster here ready to swap in, which can be swapped without ecu/biu/ key fob change - so long as the programmer has acces to can software and can reprogram the cluster to sync with the ecu
My unique problem for this however is my audm gen 4 legacy (2004) has the dual avcs 32 bit ecu (like jap spec - originally ej20x motor), and thus may pose an issue with the cluster I'm using which is from the later model (usdm 08+ equivalent) s402 Sti manual with a 9000rpm tacho. It may not be a problem at all - but I'm keen to test this out (after the swap as dont want to complicate the swap initially)
Wish me luck!
Mick