Distributors suck, they're marginal on medium revving four cylinders and low revving six cylinders and are responsible for the popularity of CDI in V8 circles :-)
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It's not well written, look at the date I posted it, but I might give it a clean up later today. The basic points are relevant, though.
Other than dwell time, the main advantage is getting rid of the air gap and oxidation points at the rotor and cap.
The secondary advantage CAN be to ditch leads too, BUT, when you do that you typically introduce a carbon rod into the path to add resistance and cause the coil to discharge more slowly with a longer spark. Leads fill that roll for you.
http://i50.photobucket.com/albums/f323/ ... 0_4471.jpg
That's my CNP (Coil Near Plug) setup on my truck in NZ. I had a very very very poor ignitor setup on it at the time, IE, the megasquirt output circuitry was wrong/bad, and it wouldn't even light up a timing light, BUT, it WOULD light the mixture off at 7500 RPM and 18psi making around 400 crank horsepower from two litres. With a proper ignitor drive you're good to very high cylinder pressures.
Wasted spark with good coils is typically good to around 9k RPM or so, but can't really be used with anything that leaves combustible gas in the inlet manifold, depending on cam profile, as it could cause an explosion.
Pseudo COP/CNP with wasted spark drive and double sparks has the same issues and rev limit.
Wasted can give you funny results if one plug is fouled too. On a conventional setup in good tune, wasted is a great solution out to very high power levels.
Now, back to FreeEMS talk, in the short term, you're limited to dizzy anyway due to the output count limitations, unless you run the injectors in batch, then you could do wasted spark. If you're happy to wait an indefinite time until Sean's code is ready to use then you'll be best to go COP/CNP and sequential, assuming your CAS input supports it, which it does, if you're using the 4g63 style one.
Clear as mud?
In terms of choosing hardware, choose whatever fits best.
Wasted spark coils from subaru flat fours are decent - I know a guy making 500hp on a twin turbo 1uzfe lexus v8 with those.
LS1 second hand coils at 200 oz dollars sounds pretty damn good, though, I'd jump on that :-) Those are hot, reliable, easy to use (logic input) and readily available, in short, a good choice :-)
Fred.