I've found that the 96/97 camaros are the bastard children of the 4th gens when it comes to PCM stuff. They are the only years that had OBDII and VPW protocol. With that said they are a bitch to work with. For reading PCM stuff i've found a few things that help.

• Linear Logic's Scanguage II: I use this for in car monitoring and DTC clearing. It has the ability to be programed with the 97's VPW PID codes.
• Scantool.net's Elm Scan5: I'll be honest i'm not particularly happy with this because it a medocore tool/software and to be able to read the adavnced PIDs for GM cars you need to buy an upgrade for 2x the cost of the base unit. But it does have some pretty useful tools for datalogging. If you plan on tuning, i'd look at this as an example for what to look for in a scantool datalogging setup.
• ELM 327 OBD2 Scan tool: This is actually an interesting scan tool, its cheap, the software sucks and the chip inside is not an elm327, but its the best if you dont mind getting dirty with computer stuff. This scan tool chip is literally an OBDII ALDL to RS-232 converter. You can use a terminal software Putty and issue PID read command to the car in a command line. There is a free tool call wOBD2 1.51 Beta that supports this scanner and does some datalogging and advanced PID reading.