iNFO Collections
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NFO files usually contain release information about the
media. The information may include authorship and licence information. If the
NFO file is for software, product installation notes can also be found.NFO files
are also often found in demoscene productions, where the respective groups
include them for credits, contact details, and the software requirements
Unlike README files, NFO files often contain elaborate ASCII art and are also
used for cataloguing purposes due to a consistent convention of the format so
that digital media metadata can be retrieved programmatically.
NFO files were first introduced by "Fabulous Furlough" and "Candyman" of the
elite PC warez organization called The Humble Guys, or THG. The THG group would
first upload their package to their world headquarters, "The P.I.T.S. BBS", to
establish distribution immediately. Such organizations are also known as warez
groups or crack groups. The first use came in 1990 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 that carry binaries and on
P2P file trading networks.
The Humble Guys later became a demogroup, thus bringing the .nfo file tradition
into the demoscene. More than forty thousand demoscene productions have an NFO
file next to the program 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.
The ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) code page 437
character set was originally designed by IBM for the earliest DOS PCs so many
years ago. Therefore, it was not destined to become standardized throughout the
non-English world. Recently to aid internationalisaiton, 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.
The files have been explained as essentially being the press releases of the
warez scene.[9] They are commonly associated with warez groups who include them
to declare credit of said release. NFO files were ubiquitous, and sometimes
required, during the era of the BBS. The file was a stamp of authenticity,
explicitly explaining what group released the software and described what
modifications (or cracks) were applied if any. Once a software was "packaged"
with an NFO and then released, it was then officially owned by that group and no
other group could ethically rerelease that particular package. A typical warez
NFO file was elaborate and highly decorated, and usually included a large ASCII
art logo along with software release and extended warez group information. The
most important information is which group, which cracker and which member
actually tested and packaged. The designers of these NFO files, who worked
closely or within the warez groups, frequently incorporated extended ASCII
characters from the character set code page 437 in the file.
As of 2016, 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.nfo