Hi,

   Questions:
   1) Does NetBSD support this machine yet?
Yep, except I don't think there is a driver for the qvss display card yet.
(There is a driver that was released with 4.4BSD-Lite, but it needs to be
 tweaked to work with NetBSD. If you could get it going, I'm sure it would
 make others happy:-)

   I did get my hands on an old service manual, and it says that 'A'
   means (among other things) that the machine is looking for the
   keyboard and monitor. The machine does have a keyboard and monitor
   connections on the back. 
   
   Any way around this? Or do I have to buy a monitor and keyboard?
   Which monitor and keyboards will work? Perhaps a ds2100 keyboard
   with adaptor? Sigh.

It is looking for a dec lk201 keyboard, aka a ds2100 keyboard will do the trick.
(and maybe also a mouse, I'm not sure if there is a mouse self test or not.
 I'm not sure what mouse you will need. The old qvss we had used a rectamgular
 mouse DEC called a VS10X, but I'm not sure if all qvss cards required that
 one.)
Alternately, you can yank out the qvss display card, since you don't
have driver support for it anyhow.

The trick here is that you can't leave any empty slots (gaps) in a qbus,
which means that you either have to move the rest of the boards up or replace
the qvss with a couple of grant continuity cards. On that machine, the
first three slots are qbus in the A-B slots, then the qbus zigzags starting
on slot 4:
	slot 4	A-B	->	C-D
	     5	C-D	->	A-B
	     6	A-B	->	C-D
	and so on..
Don't put a full width (quad) qbus board in the first three slots, but half
width (dual) qbus boards (or grant continuity cards) are needed in the A-B
side of the first three slots unless occupied by cpu or memory (fun eh!:-).

Good luck with it, rick
ps: Sorry, but I don't have the pinout for the qvss cable. If you need to
    make up a cable, maybe someone else on the list can help.