What is nfo file

The nfo file is a very common ASCII text file extension. Its content contains the relevant text description information of the main file; you can browse the content of the NFO file with a text editor or a dedicated NFO browser.



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.nfo (English: info, information; the abbreviation of "info" or "information"; can also be written as .NFO or NFO) is a fairly common ASCII text file extension, and its content contains The relevant text description information of the main file. You can use a text editor or a browser dedicated to NFO to browse the contents of the NFO file. [1] The content of the file will also contain elaborate ASCII art patterns.

In computers with 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 frequently discussed "NFO files" usually refer to textual description files, rather than Microsoft operating system information files with binary content.

Contents of

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

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

Before Windows 95 appeared, NFO files sometimes used consecutive ANSI jump characters to generate dynamic ASCII art patterns (ANSI art). However, the requirement to generate these animations is that the ANSI.SYS system file must be loaded from the DOS interface. If the user's computer has not loaded the ANSI.SYS driver file in advance, before viewing the ASCII art patterns, you need to reset Config.sys and reboot. Because of this, the ASCII art patterns were not universally popular at the time, and it was confirmed that on personal computers after Windows 95, it is difficult to display the correct ASCII art patterns because of the unequal width of the characters of the mixed characters. As a result, there are fewer and fewer NFO files.

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