On Wed, 2 Jan 2002, Gordon Zaft wrote:

> It wasn't clear to me if this thing did MSCP or not but I would
> think that would be really important from a compatibility perspective.

It might be a bit much to ask for Chuck to start manufacturing these for
people on the list.  Trying to meet people's expectations, even with
limited demand and while making a modest profit would be sort of a pain.

I'm under the impression that the these controllers don't do MSCP.  If
they did, Chuck wouldn't be asking for people to write a device driver
for them as we already have an MSCP driver.  Though it'd be nice to have
MSCP support, I don't see this as necessary for supporting NetBSD.  It
will likely be an issue for those using VMS or Ultrix, but they can
write their own drivers :-)

One question I have is how difficult would it be to add a bootloader
ROM to one of these controllers?  I know many of the SCSI/MSCP Q-Bus and
Unibus controllers have the ability to drop into their built-in
configuration utils from the console by executing code from a ROM at a
specific address.  We should be able to use something similar to load a
boot block from an IDE drive, but I'm not sure how easy this would be to
add to the controller.  It wouldn't be so slick as a "b dua0" command,
but it'd be convenient to not have to bootstrap from a floppy, the
network, or another MFM disk.

-brian.