Stepgen and 4-phase steppers

My stepgen runs drives in step_type=10. That involves four phase pins per motor (or in my case, per axis, but that's beside the point). It runs, but there's a problem.

When the drives are moving, everything is fine and they're nice and cool. But when a drive is held in a stationary position for an extended period (which, with stepgen configured like that, is any stationary position as long as the power to the controller is on) it starts to heat up, which, I imagine, can't be good for them. I imagine there would not be a problem if I could expose an enable pin from the controller that would cut power to the drives, but my parallel port is fresh out of output pins. (4*3=12, poof)

Is there a way to make stepgen set all phase output pins low if the drives are not moving, or failing that, when "machine on" pin is low?

Sure, that would introduce a deviation. But since I don't have encoders, I've already enabled VOLATILE_HOME=1 in my ini file, so I need to rehome the axes after every machine off anyway. Turning the pins off at machine off would do fine.

Is there a simple way to do that?

That's already connected to stepgen.X.enable pins, and doesn't make stepgen turn the phase pins off:

net xenable axis.0.amp-enable-out => stepgen.0.enable

I was hoping for a simpler way, but thank you, that should work.

Hi,
may I ask you a question. I would like to control a small stepper motor with a L298N driver via parallel port. For this I need 4 wires/pins because it is not step/direction method. How shall I configure linuxcnc for such a task? I think there was a video on youtube how to do it, but unfortunately I cannot find it anymore.

I would like to know how to connect A B C D wires to parallel port and how to configure stepconfig.

Thanks!