this sounds really kludgy.. It could be done, but it's really ugly, and it
then brings a PC along for the ride, with all its own problems. If one is
gonna go that route, it is much cleaner to just netboot and use the other
machine as an nfs server or something. plus, you can do that right now,
and dont need to do anything else for it.
A better solution is what's already being discussed: an MSCP server on a
Qbus card. While i'd personally prefer SCSI to IDE, the ability to put any
old disk i can find anywhere right now into my VAX is a cool things to have.
while some of us, myself included, are lucky enough to have a sufficient
supply of the CMD, emulex, and few other qbus/scsi cards, most of the users
here and elsewhere probably arent. 
I dont know if a Z80 can keep up with doing MSCP at qbus speeds. Granted, 
IDE disks alone arent any faster than the qbus, but with lots of buffering,
multiple disks, etc, i think a z80 would be swamped. how about a strongarm
or a 68k? we can be gratuitous with buffering and such these days, too.. 
I played around with supnik's simh VAX simulator. It booted unix, but 
gave some problems from the uda.. i think there are probably still some bugs
to be worked out of the mscp code there. It's definitely good enough to 
start with, though,i think.

(Now, something that i am personally really interested in is DSSI/SCSI 
converters... *grin*)

isildur

On Wed, 23 Jan 2002, Cthulhu wrote:

> 
> Since someone mentioned 80386, I tought that: why not build a QBus to
> PCI Bridge, with the minimal hardware needed to signal and timing
> conversion? I mean a real PCI card to put into a PC, where a driver
> designed for that interface would allow to "export" partitions or whole
> devices as a MSCP/DSSI/whatever drive.
> 
> Of course I don't know if this can be done in the real word, I don't
> know anything about QBus or even PCI... I just told you my last
> nightmare. :)
> 
> 	sognatamente,
> 	   Cthulhu
> 
> -- 
> 
>    Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu http://www.rlyeh.it/ wgah'nagl fhtgan!
> 		     <cthulhu (at) rlyeh (dot) it>
> 
>