What is nfo file

nfo file is the extension of a very common ASCII text file. Its content contains relevant text description information of the main file; you can use a text editor or an NFO-specific browser to browse the content of the NFO file. The content of the nfo file will also contain carefully crafted ASCII art.

The operating environment of this tutorial: Windows 7 system, Dell G3 computer.

.nfo (English: info, information; abbreviation of "info" or "information"; can also be written as .NFO or NFO) is a very common extension of an ASCII text file. Its content includes Related text description information of the main file. You can use a text editor or an NFO-specific browser to browse the contents of the NFO file. The contents of the archive will also contain carefully crafted ASCII artwork.

In computers using Microsoft Windows as the operating system, there is a different kind of NFO binary file, which is a software tool of the Microsoft operating system and is called a "system information" file. Generally speaking, the most commonly discussed "NFO file" usually refers to a text description file, rather than a Microsoft operating system information file with binary content.

Contents of NFO files

NFO files usually contain release information for software programs. Usually, in order to distribute pirated software, multiple Warez groups will announce their release information and release Warez's copyright (bragging rights) in NFO files. Similarly, you can also see NFO content on demo art products, including relevant instructions, contact methods (mostly email), and software requirements for each author or production team.

NFO used to be a quite common file in the era of BBS, but people's demand for it was not that high. A typical NFO description file will definitely have a specially crafted and enhanced decorative design, usually containing oversized ASCII art patterns, which will be included with the released software, and will also contain relevant information about the Warez team. The designers of these NFO files often combined EASCII characters from the later code page 437 character set in the file content.

Before Windows 95 appeared, NFO files sometimes used continuous ANSI escape characters to generate dynamic ASCII art patterns (ANSI art). However, the requirement to generate these animations is that the ANSI.SYS system file must first be loaded through the DOS interface. If the user's computer does not have the ANSI.SYS driver file loaded in advance, before browsing ASCII art patterns, the user needs to reset Config.sys and restart the computer. Because of this, ASCII art patterns were not generally popular at the time, and it was confirmed that on personal computers after Windows 95, it was difficult to display the correct ASCII art patterns because the characters of the blended characters were not of equal width. As a result, there are fewer and fewer NFO files.

In 2007, NFO files could still be found in many ZIP files. In today's NFO files of Warez software, there will be a common large-scale ASCII art logo pattern at the top of the content, and below the pattern is text description information. The early code page 437 EASCII characters have been replaced. Today's ASCII art patterns use the current Internet standard ISO/IEC 8859-1/ISO/IEC 8859-15 or Unicode UTF-8 characters.

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