I will give you this much - the explanation of swing in the maschine manual is pretty limited
you have to remember something about mpc swing before you can get it to work in a similar way in a maschine:
mpc swing is about shifting the off-beat 16ths (in a single beat there are two on-beats on 1 and 3 and two off-beats on 2 and 4) further away from there strict timing position
50% mpc swing is the same position as normal strict timing - everything is of equal length
66% mpc swing moves the off-beat 16ths to the triplet position of an 8th-triplet-16th-triplet pair, giving us the classic hip-hop feel
75% mpc swing takes us all the way out to dotted 16th-32nd pairings
maschine allows you far greater control of these parameters and also far more opportunities to screw it up
Cycle
You can set the beat duration that the swing is applied at 1/8, 3/16, 1/4, 6/16, 1/3, 9/16, 1/1, 2/1
the 1/8 setting appears to duplicate the intent of an mpc swing groove (off-beat 16ths are moved by the swing percentage)
going up, therefore, 1/4 shifts its focus to the 8th note, 1/2 shifts its focus to the quarter note, 1/1 shifts its focus to the half note, 2/1 shifts its focus to the whole note
Swing
you can set the level at which the swing is applied 0-100%
using just 1/8 as the cycle setting
33% sounds equivalent to mpc66%
50% is equivalent to mpc75%
100% sounds more like a flam, being right up against the next note
i.e. take whatever groove percentage you want from an mpc and divide it by 2 to get a similar groove with maschine
Invert
gives you the equivalent of reasons pre-50% grooves
i.e.
100% is no shift
66% shifts the off-beat 16th towards the on-beat 8th note in front of it
50% gives a 32nd-dotted 16th note result
0% is a flam again thought the flam starts on the beat rather before the beat
levels of groove application
the groove settings can be applied to
the sound
the group
the song (master)
groups settings are added to what ever was set at the sound level
song settings are added to whatever was set at the group level; at this level, though, there is only one parameter: swing %.
language note - ternary as used in the manual means triplet or compound time feel