Noobie 318ti turbo questions

[SomeoneWhoIsntMe]

Hey all,

I just purchased a '96 318ti with a blown headgasket and I'm looking to fix her up into a fun daily driver. In the long term, I'm already working on a wild swap project so in this car I'm sure I'll be content with ~250whp. There's a junkyard near me with an E36 M42 with 150k on it for $400 or $350 with core, so I'm about to pick that up. At first I was looking at S50 or M52B28 swaps, but after looking at dynos you just don't get very much power for the weight you add to the nose of the car.

To reach my goals, I was looking at getting an evo3 16g turbo since it's a small turbo with a tall compressor map good for making power on small displacement motors, ARP head studs, and a cometic 3mm MHG.

First off, I'm not sure which route to go with the manifold. I was thinking about getting an M43 cast stock manifold off the UK ebay and flipping it, then having an adapter welded. The OBX manifold looks great, but have they changed it from ~2009 when those build threads with it were posted? It looks like it mounts the turbo too damn low for me, the oil drain from that location wouldn't be acceptable, IMO. There's a few local fab shops that can make manifolds, but it's added time and expense.

Next, what to do about EMS? Are the OBDI or OBDII ECU's reasonably tunable, or should I head straight for megasquirt or AEM? OEM drivability would be nice, but I don't want to run a generic "turbo" tune and blow the motor from running a tune for a totally different setup. Do piggybacks like the SAFC work alright on OBDI ECU's?

Thanks guys