I wound up completely junking their controller and wiring up a Geckodrive G540. That wasn't without it's issues either. Their engineering department at gecko is awsome, but they punt on the whole issue of having to set up EPP mode on your parallel port or certain functions won't work. namely the "charge pump". I found this response kind of annoying since most parallel ports don't let you set this up. At least not the ones that you can plug into the PCI bus. So either MachIII needs to add the ability to put the port in EPP mode or you have to just avoid using the "open collector" parallel port pins. That meant (For me) wiring up to two parallel ports so I had enough I/O lines.
At any rate MaxNC's controller is basically flawed from a design standpoint so I'd start by replacing that. I then wound up hooking up the encoders to the parallel port as well, and writing a brain to turn off the machine if the encoders get out of sync with the position of the steppers. It was a month long project but in the end my machine is working. I will probably upload a video to youtube tonight on what I did.
The software Max ships is simply an older version of MachIII. I wound up not using that and just downloading the latest from the artsoft website. The same software key should work.
I'm not surprised they went under. These flaws have been in their machines for years. I don't know why they didn't fix them. After awhile, enough people bail and you have no customers Sad