better alternative to G540

I'm on my third different PCI parallel port board. Finally, after adding a 300 Ohm resistor to pull up pin 16, I have charge pump. Great. But I still can't control spindle on/off with either pin one or pin two. I assume this is down to the current requirements of the G540 combined with open collector I/O on the PCI board (which is probably not going into true EPP). This is two days in and I'd rather get something that doesn't have this limitation. So what's better than a Gecko?

This is for a TAIG, three axis CNC mill.

Well, this is a bit more expensive than you may want to deal with, but (full disclosure - my product) the Universal Stepper Controller will handle all of this. It has position to mount up to 8 solid state relays to power various devices, such as the spindle.
You can still use the G540 just for the stepper drivers, but connect all other I/O directly to our controller board.
It also has step generators to offload that task to hardware. It has encoder counters if you want to hook up a spindle encoder and.or a jog dial.

See pico-systems.com/osc2.5/catalog/product_...ath=4&products_id=20
for more info on this product.

Jon