Well, it's not that I thought of something completely groundbreaking, but here's a guide for people that can't solder very well (or at all ) and want one of these cables.

Firstly, if you don't know what a parcp cable is, have a look at http://joy.sophics.cz/parcp/parcpdoc.htm. If you read the documentation, then you can find the wiring diagram for the cable the software needs. But solder 18 wires on a D-SUB 25? Yech!

To overcome this, I had the following idea: get 2 parallel (printer) cables and cut them close to the printer port side. So you are left with 2 cables with female D-25 ports. What you have to do now is wire them up according to the following drawing:



This is the only bit that will take some time, as you need to find for each cable the correct wires. A multimeter is a must at this point (or any other means you see fit ). Another thing I have read is that because the parallel ports on computers are set to output state on boot, they can emit electricity and damage the other parallel port, so soldering some 10kΩ resistors in pins 2-9 is a good idea too (I didn't do it because I forgot it :/).

As for software supporting it, I already gave parcp a try but I only managed to get it working under pure DOS. I'll give hdd_dmn a go too, as well as some other ideas I have in mind.

I'm sure I have seen it running on your machine, so please find what software you used for parallel port under XP and the config for it