On rereading, it occurs to me....
In simh, the initialization steps of the MSCP should be possible to
have instantaneous. No reason to emulate that part of the
controller, is there?
Maybe. There's comparably sloppy code out there in the init phase,
code that requires delays to work - see below. And, depending on what
you count as "the initialization steps", what I quoted may count - that
was causing me trouble at ONLINE time. That is, the command whose
response is being awaited there is an ONLINE command, which certainly
can be seen as part of initialization.
The boot-block code I mentioned, the code I didn't post a fix for
because modern NetBSD's version is so different I'm not sure whether it
has trouble, that bug strikes in response to setting the GO bit after
step 4 of initialization, which I would say counts as part of
initialization. My fix there has two parts. One is that the code
never set up the Qbus mapping registers (see below for more on that);
the other was the race.