I don't find the VMMaker package in the Squeak3.9 final or Squak3.9 dev image. Is there a way to load these packages into the image?
I hope I don't sound rude here, but if you're so new to using Squeak that you haven't yet had to learn about loading packages etc. you may have quite a bit of trouble understanding enough of the system to start hacking image formats.
Back in 2.3 era, I didn't know anything about Smalltalk/Squeak internal (and I thought that it was a dead language) but managed to port Squeak VM to a platform. If there modules and packages, etc. existed, I wouldn't be able to pull that off^^;
There is already an image reader and writer, as well as the SystemTracer for writing a differently formatted image. Once you have the VMMaker package you will find it includes all you need (well, I won't promise there aren't bugs) to read an image into a simulation of the VM, run it and write it. IIRC Craig has probably been the most recent user of simulation so hopefully he can chime in with more info. When you have an image loaded into the simulator it is possible to find out all sorts of things about it, though more tools might be interesting.
I vaguely remember reading of some code to remotely access image files being mentioned some time ago; perhaps Yoshiki or Takashi can help?
That is my ImageBrowser thing. That does use some knowledge in CompiledMethod, MethodDictonary, etc.
It would be very helpful if you could explain what you want to do with the image.
Me, too.
-- Yoshiki