I’ve looked around the net and can’t find anything on the Software Valet file format. Does anyone here have this info?
There’s not much info out there, if any. What little I can tell you is that Be bought up a company called StarCode and IIRC acquired their packaging tools and also what became BeDepot. As for the file format, you might be able to contact some of the people who worked for StarCode and see if they can help. Even then, you’ll probably have to reverse engineer the format, anyway.
the UPKG format used by SoftwareValet is based on zlib - it might be an idea to literally try gzip on them to see will it open them…
MYOB wrote:
the UPKG format used by SoftwareValet is based on zlib - it might be an idea to literally try gzip on them to see will it open them...
That failed, but that’s for the tip.
I opened up the file and saw some TYPE, BEOS, MIM (MIME?) tag stuff (although most was unintelligeble). So, I gather that the file contains some more info that the standard compression. I also notice what seemed to be an offset and file size tags so that is probably where in the file and how big in the file, the “file in the file” is. I’ll try to decompress the “file in the file” using zlib if I ever get that far (it’s my first time trying to reverse engineer a file format) and see what happens.
DarkWyrm:
I have “Hack Proofing you Network” which covers diffing, but, do you know of any other resources that covers reverse engineering file formats? Since this is my first attempt at doing this sort of thing I’d like the experience to have no more banging my head against the wall than nessassary 
Maybe it’s just a BMessage written to the disc.
I would try to unflatten it (or how this process was called…)