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.nfo (also written .NFO or NFO, a contraction of "info", or "information") is a commonly used three-letter filename extension of ASCII or extended ASCII text files that accompany other files and contain information about them. Such NFO files can be viewed with text editors or dedicated NFO viewers. They commonly also contain elaborate ASCII art.

Different kinds of files with the same NFO filename extension on Microsoft Windows PCs are data files associated with a Microsoft software tool called System Information. Generally speaking, these kinds of files are less often being referred to when "NFO files" are being mentioned.

Content of NFO files

NFO files usually contain release information about a software program. They are commonly associated with warez groups who include them to declare credit of and "bragging rights" over said release. Similarly they are often found in demoscene productions, where the respective groups include them for credits, contact details, and the software requirements.

NFO files were common, and sometimes required, during the era of the BBS. A typical warez NFO file was elaborate and highly decorated, and usually included a large ASCII art logo along with software release and warez group information. The designers of these NFO files frequently incorporated extended ASCII characters from the then near-ubiquitous code page 437 character set in the file.

Before Windows 95 was introduced, NFO files also sometimes used ANSI-escape sequences to generate animated ASCII art (ANSI art). These animations, however, required ANSI.SYS to be loaded by the DOS shell. If the user's computer wasn't already configured to load the ANSI.SYS driver, viewing ANSI art required reconfiguring and rebooting. Because of this, ANSI art was much less common, and getting ANSI art to display correctly on a Windows 95 PC often proved more difficult, leading to a decline of such art in NFO files.

As of 2008, NFO files can still be found in many ZIP archives. In modern day warez NFO files, a large ASCII art logo is frequently shown at the top, followed by textual information below. Instead of using the old code page 437 extended ASCII characters, modern ASCII art uses the current de-facto web standard ISO-8859-1/ISO-8859-15 or Unicode UTF-8 characters.

Compatibility problems

Because the once-ubiquitous ASCII code page 437 was never common on the World Wide Web and is poorly supported by most (as of 2007) modern computers, older NFO files are frequently rendered incorrectly in modern web browsers and on modern operating systems (which mostly no longer use code page 437). To display old NFO files as intended, a dedicated CP437-capable viewing software is often required.

An added problem lies in the fact that many modern web browsers and text editing programs often use proportional fonts, whereas the ASCII art included in both old and new NFO files is heavily dependent on the file being viewed with a fixed width font. As a workaround on Windows OSes, simply using Windows Notepad and selecting the Terminal font may, in the absence of incompatible extended ASCII characters, sometimes be sufficient. In this case, the only difference might be that the text will be black on a white background in Notepad (rather than white on a black background as seen when viewing in MS-DOS), thus making some of the art appear to be "inverse", like a film negative.

Canonical origins

NFO files were first introduced by "Fabulous Furlough" of the PC organization The Humble Guys, or THG. Such organizations are also known as "warez groups" or "crack groups". The first use came in 1989 on the THG release of the PC game "Bubble Bobble". This file was used in lieu of the more common "README.TXT" or "README.1ST" file names. The perpetuation of this file extension legacy was carried on by "warez groups" which followed after THG and is still in use to this day, hence its strong presence on Usenet newsgroups which carry binaries and on P2P file trading networks.

The Humble Guys later became a demogroup, thus bringing the .nfo file tradition into the demoscene.

See also

• README
• FILE ID.DIZ
• The iSONEWS

References

1. As an example, when a user opens a .rar file with WinRAR that contains a .nfo file, it will show up in the viewer to the right of the archive list to display information about that archive.
2. NFO files by THG - Evidence of the very first NFO files by The Humble Guys.

• ASCII art
• Warez