1990 Gauges & Driver Information System

  • Thread starter Thread starter Rocketguy
  • Start date Start date
R

Rocketguy

Guest
The gauge package Olds offered on the '88 – '90 Ninety Eights and Eighty Eights was excellent. The cluster with the gauges features a backlit display over the base cluster's front lit display, and has a very nice gauge package. Also available on these cars was the awesome Drives Information System. I have a '90 88 that came with the base cluster, and a donor '90 98 with the gauges and DIS. I pulled out both Instrument Panels, and plugged the one with all the cool stuff into the car without. I took the respective wiring harnesses with both I/Ps, but did not change the harness that runs along the firewall of the car. The speedo, gas gauge, volt gauge and oil gauge work. The temperature gauge does not work. The DIS has power and will light up, but only the time/date functions work.

The service manual shows a module for the DIS, but I have 3 cars with the DIS and none of them have a module where the service manual shows it to be behind the I/P on top of the heat box. Could this have been a running change on production?

Has anyone ever done this swap?

Why do my temperature gauge and DIS not work?

I am willing to switch or run a few wires, but I am not willing to change the whole firewall harness as it involves changing the whole door harnesses as well.

Any help anyone can give me will be greatly appreciated : )
 
I forgot to mention:
In the service manual it says the DIS has it's own PROM. I changed the ECM with the PROM to the one from the 98 as well.
 
Information system

I have a 1993 olds 88 Royale LS. The information center isn't working. It has started making a constant high pitched beeping noise and sometimes the read out center is black and sometimes it is just little flashing dots. Do you know how to disable the information center or how to fix it? I just want the beeping to stop. It is driving me crazy. I don't have a lot of money to put into this car as it is getting a lot of miles on it and I am on a limited budget. My brother has done a lot of work on the car for me and knows a lot about cars and he took the dash off but didn't know which wires went to what. Was wondering if you could offer any advice.
Thanks.
 
DIS Wiring

Rocketguy:

My 1990 shop manual says you need the following connections:

Black Plug A=serial data from ECM. supplies RPM, voltage, temperature and injector timing information. (also connects to M of the ALDL)
Black Plug B=VSS input signal from ECM.
Black Plug C=signal from fuel tank sender
Black Plug D=Ground if digital dash

Blue Plug A=Battery from fuse 11
Blue Plug B=IGN from fuse 16
Blue Plug C=Lights On from fuse 25
Blue Plug D=Dimmer
Blue Plug E=Ground
Blue Plug F=Ground if TS gauges
Blue Plug G=(doesnt say)
Blue Plug H=Ground

Track down that black plug pin A wire.
 
So the main vehicle PROM has to be changed in order to use the DIS?

I have a DIS that I'm intending to install in the 88 Delta, and I also have the non-TS gauge package to install in the Delta. I'm going to have to combine the DIS with the gauge package wiring. The DIS I have is from a 1991 Delta 88 with the gauge package, and my gauge package is from a 1988 Ninety-Eight that didn't have the DIS.

I'm prepared to be thoroughly confused but I do have an 88 service manual and access to Alldata for other diagrams. I just need to sit down and puzzle out what all exactly I have to do to install both.
 
Those old post I made were . . . well a long time ago. I have answers to all of those questions now.

8ball, thanks for posting all of that, very cool!

The gist is that yes you could swap all of those wires in the harness to cluster connectors, but then you'd have to ad the ones your original car probably came without anyway (It does depend on which equipment your car came with originally). The best way is to change the I/P harness, and even then you still have to ad the wires to the C200 connector that your car came without. And yes you have to have the PROM or just swap the whole ECM.

And if your adding the gauges and DIS from a 1SD car, why not ad keyless entry and the reminder package? It is all part of that same I/P harness. I have done it.

Dec06IP.jpg
 
The Ninety-Eight gauge donor did have the reminder package. I got the entire dash harness from that car. Also got all the Twilight Sentinel stuff.
 
Nice!

The cars I have done this swap on are the '90 - '91 cars and I know the wire harnesses are different on the '88 -- '89 models. Some of the '90 -'91 harnesses I have seen on cars with gauges and no DIS still had the connectors for the DIS in the I/P harness. Some did not.

Have a look at the one from your donor car and see.

And I'm sorry that I misspoke: Keyless did not come out until '90 so it would be more difficult to ad to the older models.
 
my buddy's recently purchased 1988 Ninety-Eight came prewired for a DIS. I happened to have a DIS lying around, so we plugged it up. The date/time stuff worked but that's about it.

I reviewed this thread and thought, "Hmm, guess I need the PROM to make it work". Went to the Pull a Part this past weekend and snagged the PROM out of 3 different DIS equipped cars (one without gauges, one with gauges, one with digital dash). The digital dash PROM is different than the other two but the other two carry the same part number.

I swapped the PROM out in the 98's stock ECM but the DIS still didn't work.

Does this mean the whole ECM has to be changed or did I miss something somewhere?
 
I doubt it, the ECM for the LN3s all have the same part number from what I've seen.

It makes sense to me that w/and w/o gauges were the same because they use sensors from the engine to function and do not require the ECM. The digital cluster does becuase of the electronic PRNDL321 and it uses the ECM for the temp gauge (though both digital and U39 gauges clusters have a temp gauge the senders are different, go figure).

It was a year and a half ago so I don't remember reading that in the manual any more. I do remember reading that some of the early model DIS units had thier own module. I know the '89s and '90s did not have a separate module but DK about the '88. My guess is that when they changed the units from the older "Auto Calculator" style DIS units they converted to having the module right on the unit and not remotely.

What you describe did happen to me the first time I hooked one of those up. I connected the orange wire for the serial data and then it worked fine. The wire comes from the ECM, but you can tap into it at the OBD data connector or what ever you call it. I just spliced a wire there at the connector, ran it up to the DIS, and drove a way happy.

To check it you could check for continuity from the orange wire at the DIS to the data connector.

Good luck man, the DIS rocks.
 
I would have thought that if they made the effort to prewire the car for DIS that the DIS wiring harness would already have the serial data wire going to it??

I can't wrap my mind around the idea they put all those wires in there and didn't have all the wires needed to make it work.

Of course this is the same company that built my 88 Delta coupe with NO trunk light.
 
It was all about option groups and the number of harnesses they made. It was too specialized to make a custom harness for every single car so they broke it down to option groups. It would be interesting to see what criteria they used for selecting them.

Another variable is that some accessories were offered as free flow, where others were only available with a group.

The lack of a serial data wire to the I/P harness may be because the data connector is part of the body harness and not part of the I/P harness. Just because the I/P harness had the wire did not mean that the body harness had to have it.
 
How do you install the Driver information system in a 1989 olds 98Regency. Do you have to pull the dashboard out?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top