<very nice if everyone had Q-bus SCSI controller, or MCSP speaking UltraDMA
<IDE controllers for their Q-bus and Unibus MicroVAXen, but it's not going
<to happen.

Therein lies the point. 

<PIO IDE will no doubt perform most heinously, especially in something like
<a MicroVAX II.  The point is offering support under NetBSD/vax for such

No worse than scsi pio, likely better as the SCSI and MSCP interface 
protocal wrapper is removed.

<controllers would allow people to have easy access to insanely common and
<cheap storage media.  Gee... I can pay $800US for a used Q-bus SCSI
<controller, or I can have these diseased 70MB RD53 for free, or I can
<design my own K-R4D UltraDMA Q-bus card with with Radio Shack
<breadboarding for beginners kit.

Painful, I know.  Its hard to spend a bomb on a used SCSI adaptor for 
more expensive SCSI drives when you can get a IBM IDE 10GB for $179.

<A cheap PIO IDE option would be nice.

doing Qbus DMA is not so hard and if you can find a DRV-11B plus the prints 
for DRV11P DEC has done some of the work.  Even though the DEC chips may be 
scarce (other than stripping old boards) the functions are easily done using 
available TTL and CMOS or for those that can FPGAs.

Heck The drive bay on my BA23 uVAX would easily hold several IDE drives and 
not even draw 1/3rd the power of the one 2190!

Then again it was only a week or two ago that someone dug up the info on 
how to make a VS2000 talk SCSI to disks!


Allison