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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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