MGC Converter

Extract text from MGC files

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Drop or upload your .MGC file

Online File Converter

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How to extract text from your MGC file

Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your MGC file.
You’ll see a preview, if available.
Click the "Convert file to..." button to extract text information.

Convert MGC to another file type

To convert your MGC file to another format, you need Unix file command or other System software.

Convert a file to MGC

To convert other file formats to the "Compiled Database" file type, you need software like Unix file command or a similar tool.

About MGC files

The .MGC file extension is primarily associated with the Compiled Magic Database, a binary system file used by the standard Unix file command to identify other file types based on their internal "magic numbers." Because these files are compiled from plain text source files to improve lookup performance, they are not human-readable and cannot be opened in standard text editors like Microsoft Notepad or Sublime Text. Users often encounter friction when attempting to inspect these files on Windows systems (often installed via Git for Windows or WSL), as the operating system lacks native tools to parse them.

A secondary but significant use case involves Magic Dosbox, an Android DOS emulator, where the .MGC file serves as a game configuration collection. In this context, the file is often just a renamed ZIP archive containing metadata and settings. Friction arises when users try to migrate these configurations between devices or edit specific game parameters without realizing the file is a standard archive.

Best Conversion Targets:

For Unix/System Use: Use the file -C command to compile text sources into .MGC, or locate the original source text files for editing. There is no direct "converter" to standard formats like DOCX because it is a system binary.
For Magic Dosbox: Rename the extension from .MGC to ZIP to extract, view, or edit the internal configuration files (usually CONF or BAT) using any standard archive manager like 7-Zip.
For Legacy Media: If the file originates from the obsolete Microsoft Clip Organizer, it is likely a proprietary catalog file that is no longer supported in modern versions of Microsoft Office. The best approach is to check if the file can be imported into an older Office suite to recover metadata, though this is rarely successful.

Convert.Guru analyzes your MGC file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.

Users also converted PDF, SAV, 3 and WT files.

FAQ

If you want to convert MGC file to CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, YML, TOML, INI, CFG, CONF, DAT, DB or SQL, you can use Unix file command or similar software from the "File Type Identification Database" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….

To convert DBF, XML, SQLITE, XLSX, SQL, TSV, ACCDB, YAML, MDB, CSV, ODS or JSON files to MGC, try Unix file command or another comparable tool in the "File Type Identification Database" category.

The MGC Converter Story

The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our MGC converter.