Ascension is an .NFO file viewer that aims to display ASCII as it was meant to be seen, i.e. using antiquated code pages in a way that modern browsers and text viewers are not capable of.
The irony of an .NFO reader for Mac is that the heyday of the .NFO file format appears to have been the MS-DOS era - it's hard to conceive that any of them were created with a modern Mac user in mind. But perhaps it's this niche need that makes Ascension particularly useful. As a longtime Mac user, I certainly hadn't heard of the format before, and had a hard time finding examples of art created with it. For those who, like me, are simply curious to see how this old-school ASCII art thing works, there's a free pack of sample .NFOs on the Ascension website.
Strangely, the default purple-on-purple color scheme is not available as one of the application's eight provided schemes. It begs the question a little of why the developers stopped short of providing full color customization.
Pros
- DIZ and ASC files are also supported
- Encoding, colors, and window size can be selected
Cons
- Color selection is limited to eight sets
- ASCII art that's not a supported filetype will not be viewable