depending on how much money people are willing to spend, one could take 
a small prototype board or one of the SBCs that are out there with a 
small MIPS or 386-clone cpu on them and write the MSCP server to run on 
there.. it would be costlier and uglier but a lot easier than doing a 
full-on embedded MSCP implementation. 
I wonder what might be gained looking at a disassembly of the firmware 
fro e.g. a CMD card.. Dont they have a 186 on them? ultimately, though, 
yes, MSCP will be tough. Are there any generic Qbus interface designs? 
There was a sort of reference Qbus interface card at some point that i 
heard mention of on some occasions, but not having to design the Qbus 
interface from scratch would be a big help too. As for the IDE side... if 
there were a couple of IDE interfaces on it, and the microprocessor was 
sufficiently capable (decent MIPS cpu and a couple megs of core) then
it would even be concievable to have a very stripped down netbsd running 
on _it_ doing raidframe over 4 IDE disks and running an MSCP server out 
over the qbus. That'd take care of some of the issues of IDE disks being 
of pretty questionable reliability these days.. it'd also allow easier 
development of the MSCP server code. 

my .02,
Isildur

On Thu, 21 Nov 2002 Robertdkeys@aol.com wrote:

> Well, what about a generic scsi-mscp controller
> rather than an ide-mscp thing?  Surely there
> ought to be some way to do that, and maybe run
> off a hundred boards or so, and let folks at
> it with the soldering pencils.
> 
> Bob
>