well, the actual "initial advance" value you come up with will depend almost entirely on the trigger wheel/crank sensors bracket you come up with. i think that's why they had trouble in the other thread, it wasn't setup to emulate exactly where it would have been on a N*, so it came out odd.

perhaps the min/max advance is mask dependant... with the 93-95 3100/3.4 flash PCM, i have max SA at 60.35* BTDC and min SA is -30* BTDC (so 30* ATDC).

then again, they could have been dealing with SA compared to reference pulse as well, which can throw in some more interesting math.