What is a .DMS file?
A .DMS file is a special type of file that was used with Amiga computers. Amiga was a popular computer system in the 1980s and 1990s. The ".DMS" stands for Disk Masher System, which is a program that was used to compress and store Amiga disk images. These disk images are like snapshots of what was on an Amiga computer's floppy disk. People used these files to share games, software, and other types of data for the Amiga.
Back in the day, Amiga users would physically pass around floppy disks with these .DMS files to share software. Nowadays, since Amiga computers are not as common, these files are mainly used by people who enjoy playing old Amiga games or using Amiga software on modern computers. They do this through something called an emulator, which is a program that makes your modern computer act like an old Amiga computer. Some popular emulators that can open .DMS files include Cloanto Amiga Forever, WinFellow, WinUAE, and MaxUAE. Another program called The Unarchiver can also open these files, but it's mainly used on Mac computers.
Speaking of Mac computers, there's an interesting issue that sometimes happens when you download files using the Safari web browser or the Mail app. Sometimes, these programs mistakenly change the extension of a file you're downloading to .dms. For example, if you were downloading a PDF file, it might end up being named "sample.pdf.dms" instead of "sample.pdf". This problem has been around for a while and can happen with various types of files, not just .DMS files meant for Amiga computers. If you encounter this, you might need to manually change the file extension back to what it should be.
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