How to configure second parallel port pins as input only

Some years ago i did a lot of testing with parallel ports and i do like them for what they are, since the days of bad floppies and copying data from a PC to another, it was a blessing and blazing fast.
The modes mentioned above work properly, even on some add on PCI cards i had ( still have some left ), the only issue was that the 4 control pins require a bit more current to trip when in input mode. Had some small 60W servo motors driven by some 3A drives, when wired to those pins the encoder could not provide enough current to change the state. All other pins would work nicely with them, so i had two ports and 4 motors, loop controlled by Linuxcnc with PWM, got to the point of controlling a small mill for quite some time. Just found the drives and one of the motors earlier today as i needed a small DC servo motor for some testing.