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Creating NFO files - Software and ASCII

Page 2/3 of this article

Note: Although reading this page can be interesting, it isn't necessary for creating NFO files. We are actually going to create the files on the next page.

Many NFO files contain pictures or logos. If you look carefully, you will see that these pictures consist of all sorts of characters. These characters come from the standard and extended ASCII sets. For more information about ASCII, just use Google. It eventually boils down to one point: 225 different types of characters that can be used to create text and/or pictures. All the pictures you see in a NFO file are created using characters from this ASCII set.

All ASCII characters can be seen at the Lookuptables website.

You probably understand that it would be a very difficult job to create these pictures manually. Fortunately there is some software to make things easier for us.

Before we explain how to create a NFO file with an ASCII picture, we need some of software. We use freeware for this. The software we use in this tutorial is:

Offline ASCII editors are not t recommended because of their complexity. Nevertheless ASCII Draw is a fine program for creating these pictures.

Another editor you might want to use is JavE.

image

Furthermore, there are a lot of programs that can convert various formats to ASCII:

  • JPG < > ASCII
  • GIF < > ASCII
  • HTML < > ASCII

And so on. All of them have the same purpose: creating a very small file which isn't too bad to look at.

Fun with ASCII

If you already took a moment to search for the words ‘ASCII art’ with Google, you no doubt found something you liked, and you will probably be able e to use it 1:1 in your own NFO file.

For example with an online editor you can create something like this: 
  _       _                          _                _  _             _   _ 
 | |__   (_)  _ __     __ _   _ __  (_)   ___   ___  | || |     __ _  | | | |
 | '_ \  | | | '_ \   / _` | | '__| | |  / _ \ / __| | || |_   / _` | | | | |
 | |_) | | | | | | | | (_| | | |    | | |  __/ \__ \ |__   _| | (_| | | | | |
 |_.__/  |_| |_| |_|  \__,_| |_|    |_|  \___| |___/    |_|    \__,_| |_| |_|

To the next chapter: Creating NFO files