Yeah some people think 65 dollars is a lot of money. Realistically you could save 60 dollars by just doing XBR properly over LPT, but it does take a few hours to figure out. Technically you don't need a LPT plug, if you're cheap all you need is the 100 ohm resistors, and the 3 diodes, and some wire. I had to use 50ohm ones for one of my zephyrs, and 100 ohm ones worked for the other. The new zephyr did not work on them, had to use falcon, I discovered this by accident because of a broken power plug post.
You can stick the wires right from the resistors/diode/ground of the xbox to the LPT port(bend them over if it's non standed wire), it was easy and cheap. The LPT male plug I bought didnt work, possibly cos I put wires straight into the plug.
I ended up taking a cat5 cable and putting the wires from that into the LPT port, then plugging that to a coupler, and then on my xboxes there are cat5 cables soldered to the matching places to do the LPT hack.
Cygnos is probably better if you're worried about not backing up your nand the first time and bricking your xbox. The cost of the cygnos might make up for the spending 10-20 hours I spent trying to do it on LPT.
I recommend doing grim187s 4 step xbreboot guide, not the 4 step xbreboot guide with gentoo, because it doesn't have you backup the entire nand before flashing xell, which could be confusing to fix for some.