So i figured out another way to get this plotter to work and im in the process of designing the conversion. I ordered 4 of the following stepper drivers for 6 wire unipolar steppers
http://store.qkits.com/moreinfo.cfm/QK179and i plan on using EMC2 on a linux ubuntu box as it lets you set the individual pinout on a DB-25 cable for communications. it also runs the plotter/cutter/whatever live. I was wondering if anyone knew any good starting settings for EMC2 configurations or if i should set things up relatively slow for the first little while whilst i configure and calibrate the cutter. Thanks in Advance David.
P.S. the other solution i had was to buy a seperate controller for the existing electronics in the plotter which would have cost me about $1300