At 03:19 PM 1/2/2002 -0800, Brian Chase wrote:
>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.

Just to make it clear, I'm not 'asking' or 'expecting' anything, and I'm 
quite impressed by Chuck's work.  I just want one, and I can't do the FPGA 
thing.

>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 :-)

         Agreed.

>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.

         Also agreed.  I'd like to be able to boot something without having 
to have hard-to-get MFM or ESDI disks.

G