Yaa, with older types, the dizzy / ignition was a little system pretty much independant of every thing else (allowing people to fit carbs to things like 205GTi's and remove the ECU altogether). The dizzy triggered the coil to go off (instead of the ECU) using a little switching mechanism (you hear people talking about 'points').
Also, the rotor arm was free to swing about which it did depending largely on engine speed. Engine load was sensed by vacuum by the little UFO thing you see on old dizzies.
Anyway, the upshot of it all was that if you moved the dizzy round, you adjusted the point of reference it had so if you moved it to advance by 1degree, you ended up with a 1degree advance everywhere in the rev range.
With the ECU triggered system, the position of the dizzy cap is largely acedemic. So long as the arm's pointing at the correct contact when the coil fires, all's well.
You tend to find that the contact on the end of the rotor arm is much wider with ECU triggered system than clockwork ones to allow for different advances without any of the parts having to move.
That's not a very good explanation is it
