NFO File Documentation

Summary

A Warez Information File (pronounced “info”) is a plain-text file that accompanies a software, game or media release: it credits the group, describes the contents and shows a large ASCII-art logo. A .nfo file (MIME type text/plain) is text in IBM Code Page 437 (CP437), so the artwork only renders correctly in a CP437-aware NFO viewer such as GetDiz or iNFekT; a plain editor shows garbled box characters. Note: Windows System Information also saves .nfo files, and Kodi uses .nfo for movie metadata, both unrelated XML/binary formats.

Technical details

FeatureValue
Full nameWarez Information File (scene/release NFO)
File extension.nfo
MIME typetext/plain
Format typePlain-text file with ASCII/ANSI art
Character setIBM PC Code Page 437 (CP437) / ANSI
OriginPC warez scene, credited to The Humble Guys (THG)
IntroducedAround 1990
Magic numberNone — plain text, no fixed first bytes
Typical widthFixed-width, commonly 80 columns
Font neededMonospaced DOS/CP437 font (e.g. Terminal) for correct art
ContentsGroup logo, release title/date, notes, install instructions, greetings
Open standardYes — it is just text; the convention is informal
CP437-aware viewersGetDiz, iNFekT, nfomation.net (online)
Plain-text editorsNotepad++ (set encoding to OEM/CP437), Notepad, TextEdit
Same-extension formatsWindows System Information report (msinfo32); Kodi/Plex XML metadata
Related extensions.diz, .txt, .sfv, .asc, .ans
Specificationen.wikipedia.org/wiki/.nfo
Structure at a glance

A scene .nfo is a plain-text file with no signature. Its defining trait is the encoding: the artwork is built from the block and box-drawing characters of IBM Code Page 437 (CP437), the original IBM PC character set. Bytes in the 0xB0–0xDF range that CP437 draws as shading blocks (░▒▓) and box lines (═║╔╗) are interpreted as entirely different glyphs under UTF-8 or Windows-1252, which is why an NFO opened naively looks like garbage. Rendered in a CP437 code page with a fixed-width DOS font, the same bytes form the group's logo. Layout is column-aligned text: an art header, then a release-info block, install notes and greetings.

What is an NFO file?

An .nfo file (pronounced “info”) is a plain-text Warez Information File: the information file that traditionally ships inside a software, game or media “release” from the PC warez and demo scene. The convention dates to around 1990 and is commonly credited to the group The Humble Guys (THG). A release group includes a .nfo to name themselves, describe the release (title, date, packaging, install or crack notes), send greetings to other groups, and, its signature feature, display an elaborate ASCII/ANSI-art logo.

Technically the file is nothing more than text, but text with a specific heritage: it is written in IBM PC Code Page 437 (CP437), the character set of the original IBM PC, and the artwork is built from CP437's block and box-drawing characters. That single fact drives everything about how the file behaves today, including why it so often appears as a screen of garbled symbols and why dedicated “NFO viewers” exist at all.

CP437 and why the art breaks in a modern editor

Code Page 437 assigns a printable glyph to every byte from 0 to 255. The upper half, roughly bytes 0xB0 through 0xDF, holds the graphics characters an NFO artist relies on: light, medium and dark shading blocks (░ ▒ ▓), the full block and half blocks, and the single and double box-drawing lines and corners (═ ║ ╔ ╗ ╚ ╝). Arranged on a fixed-width grid, these form the logos and banners.

A modern text editor defaults to UTF-8 or Windows-1252, where those same byte values mean completely different things. Byte 0xB1, a shading block in CP437, is not a shading block in Windows-1252, and in UTF-8 a lone high byte is not even a valid character, so the editor substitutes replacement glyphs. The bytes on disk are unchanged; only the interpretation is wrong. Displaying the file correctly requires two things together: the CP437 code page (so each byte maps to the intended glyph) and a fixed-width DOS-style font (so the grid lines up). That is exactly what an NFO viewer such as GetDiz or iNFekT does, and what an online viewer like nfomation.net does in the browser. In an editor that supports it, setting the encoding to OEM/CP437 and choosing a Terminal or dedicated CP437 TrueType font achieves the same result. The file is also conventionally fixed-width, usually 80 columns, so a proportional font or a narrow window wraps and destroys the art even when the encoding is right.

The anatomy of a scene NFO

Though there is no formal schema, scene NFOs follow a recognisable layout built entirely from aligned text:

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│   [ big CP437 ASCII-art group logo / banner ] │   art header
├──────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│   Title .......... Some Application v2.0       │   release info block
│   Group .......... EXAMPLE                      │
│   Date ........... 2026-07-22                   │
│   Type ........... Retail / Keygen / Rip        │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│   Release notes / install instructions         │   notes
├──────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│   Greetings to: ... other groups ...           │   greets
└──────────────────────────────────────────────┘

The art header carries the group's identity; the info block is the machine-readable-ish summary of what the release is; notes explain how to unpack or apply it; and greetings are shout-outs to other groups and members. A closely related scene file is the .diz (FILE_ID.DIZ), a short plain description historically read by BBS software. Neither has a byte signature, so tools identify an NFO by its extension and its CP437 content, not by any header.

The .nfo collision: msinfo32 and Kodi

The .nfo extension is shared by three unrelated things, and the collision is the single most common source of confusion. This page's NFO is the scene text file. But Windows' own System Information tool (msinfo32.exe) saves hardware and software reports as .nfo, in a Microsoft XML/binary format that is nothing like text art. And media centres such as Kodi, Jellyfin and Plex store small XML metadata files, one per movie or episode, as .nfo, holding titles, cast and artwork links for the library scraper.

Because Windows associates .nfo with System Information by default, double-clicking a scene NFO usually launches msinfo32, which tries to parse the CP437 text as its own report format and fails with “System Information cannot open this NFO file.” That error is expected, not a sign of a corrupt file or a virus. The fix is to open the scene NFO explicitly: right-click, Open with, and pick Notepad or a dedicated NFO viewer instead of letting the default association handle it.

Rendering the art to a portable image

Because correct display depends on an encoding and a font that many systems lack, the genuinely useful conversion is rendering an NFO to an image. Dedicated viewers such as iNFekT and the online nfomation.net can export the rendered NFO as a PNG or JPG (or to HTML with an embedded web font), baking the CP437 art into pixels so it looks right anywhere, on a phone, in a chat, on a Mac, without the recipient needing a CP437 font at all. Converting an NFO to .txt, by contrast, is close to a no-op: it is already text, and stripping to plain ASCII discards the box-drawing art that makes it an NFO in the first place.

References