Well it's all ok now
Got a motion controller, as many PCI cards for the parallel pore are just jumped up usb cards and as such won't work. I used a uc100 cost a lot, but then I could have had to get several parallel port cards before I found one which worked. Note this will only work with win 7,8. 2000and xp. I went for win 7 (8 is awful) and xp is good but history. The installation puts mach 3 in first then it's own drivers and it has a smart little screen in the plugins section of Mach 3 which enables you to view the port conditions without using the complex diagnostics tab
The e stop and limits worked almost straight away, but at 2am it was time to put out a few zzzz's so today it's all about sorting the motors and spindle drive...then just the splash guards, lamp, coolant pump
This is a windscreen washer pump controlled for speed with a very cheap speed controller from ebay-£6.50 for two! -it works well in test and the flow is very controllable drawing 1-3.5 amps


Final task is just how do I use the thing!


Ps if you want a decent free cad/cam package. Get Fusion 360 from Autodesk. It's a bit of a pain to find the correct website to get the permanent free usage and the tutorials are great. This is upto date full on industrial standard package
Happy milling

pps thanks for all the help and advice guys