@willkallio After getting that machine to run LinuxCNC within a day, as I fully expected, I got drug down a rabbit-hole of trying to rewire and reconfigure it to "fake-out" a Tormach interface card with a bastardized version of LinuxCNC. What "success" looked like was never clear, and after three unpaid weeks, I ended up leaving the project to the "geniuses." I no longer have access to the machine, and I am guessing that my working stepconf was discarded.
However, I can tell you that my basic approach was to trace the wiring out to see which signals had to be on which parallel-port pins and then using the stepconf wizard to start trying to move the stepper motors.