1993 Toyota Camry engine diagnosis

if you want to check for valve damage. do a simple compression check and that will tell you if your valves or rings or gasket is bad. also you were saying that you have some bucking especially up a hill under load. well your mapp sensor measures load so you may want to take a look at that , maybe ohm test it so see if its ok, get back to us with your findings , thanx

I took it into a shop for diagnosis. The entire problem was isolated to a bad spark plug wire. Once wires were replaced (with cap/rotor) the engine miss was eliminated. This points out a couple of things - keep good records of when maintenance is done and don't jump ahead in troubleshooting. I replaced the spark plugs after the problem started but I did not see any issues with the wires. If I would have remembered how old they were I probably would have replaced them or inspected them better. thanks for the help,...engine now has 221000 miles and still running well....will check the gas mileage on next fill up,