Super Classic Videogames

Magic Super Griffin

pc engine

 

Well look what I found today and want to share with you. It is the rare Magic Super Griffin (Super Magic Griffin as some call it).

 

Dont have an expensive Hu card? Do you want a solution to this problem AND play it on your own system? Well this baby is the one for you. This unit allows you to play ROMS off of a floppy disk. It can also serve and back up a hu card and produce a ROM from that hu card thus it can copy a ROM. It is a Chinese import and is rare. It is very hard to find boxed. I have about 2 of these units. It is awesome and I highly recommend it.


NEC PC-Engine/Super Grafx - MAGIC SUPER GRIFFIN
-----------------------------------------------
Front plug in, or by expansion slot and cable.
Dos on ROM (upgrade dos via disk, ala KStart image files!)
4mbit RAM - Upgradeable to 8mbit.
3.5" High Density Disk Drive supplied
720k-1.6 megabyte disk format. Standard MS-DOS format.
Can connect via parallel to PC to load, save and edit games.
Requires 2 extra power supplies, one for unit and one for drive.

magic super griffin

 

Magic super griffin port

Super magic griffin attached

MAGIC SUPER GRIFFIN

I found this information as well if you already own a Magic Super Griffin but would like to be able to mod it to your own PC floppy drive. Well here is some Technical Info that may help you with this task.

34 Pin IDC to 25 Pin Female D-Sub floppy drive pin mapping for Magic Super Griffin
(and probably MGD2, etc)

I cracked open my Magic Super Griffin today after finding an old external floppy drive (FDD) that I wanted to hook up to it. I was expecting to have to look at chip pinouts and signals to figure out which pins were which on the 25-pin connector but to my surprise there was space on the motherboard for a 34pin IDC connector. So the signals can and pinout could be taken directly from that. The FDD controller chip on the SMG, for reference, is a socketed (!) Motorola MCS3201FN - http://www.datasheetarchive.com/pdf-datasheets/Datasheets-111/DSAP0039438.html. The datasheet reveals that the controller can handle up to 1.4M drives too.

\ 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 /
\ 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 /

The pins above are taken looking directory at the female pin (cable) side of the D-Sub connector.

The pins of the IDC connector are numbered from left to right, vertically, from the component side of the board.

01 02
03 04

33 34

The pin mapping is thus:

D-Sub - IDC - Signal
01 - 01,03,...,33 - GND
02 - 08 - /INDEX
03 - 26 - /TRK00
04 - 28 - /WPT
05 - 30 - /RDATA
06 - 34 - /DSKCHG
07 - NC - NC
08 - NC - +5V
09 - NC - NC
10 - NC - NC
11 - 16 - /MOTEB
12 - 22 - /WDATA
13 - 24 - /WGATE
14 - 02 - /REDWC
15 - 32 - /SIDE1
16 - 18 - /DIR
17 - 20 - /STEP
18 - 01,03,...,33 - GND
19 - 01,03,...,33 - GND
20 - 01,03,...,33 - GND
21 - 01,03,...,33 - GND
22 - 01,03,...,33 - GND
23 - 01,03,...,33 - GND
24 - 01,03,...,33 - GND
25 - 01,03,...,33 - GND
Shield - 01,03,...,33 - GND

With the above information I'm now able to make a suitable cable to connect up any standard PC floppy disk drive. I don't know which model drives are actually compatible. Though I would suggest checking out the Datasheet for the FDD controller chip. If you have any success please let me know so I can share the information with others.

BTW, If you didn't know already a Super Magic Griffin is a PC Engine console backup unit. With it you can load dumped ROM images into the SMG and then run them on your PC Engine console. The unit is basically a ROM emulator with FDD and Parallel I/O connections. They were manufactured by Front Fareast Co. Ltd. (Taiwan).

 

 

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