Iff Snooper X

IFF Snooper X is the OS X (Carbon) build of Peter Gould's IFFSnooper utility, version 1.1.7 released January 2005. Despite the "IFF" name suggesting Maelstrom or Amiga IFF graphics, it is a resource viewer and editor for the IFF container files used by Maxis's The Sims 1 and its expansions.

What the file format is

The Sims stored objects, walls, floors, and family data inside variants of the EA IFF chunk format, with extensions like .iff, .wll, .flr, and .FAM. IFFSnooper recognises all four extensions and decodes their internal resource chunks so they can be inspected outside the game.

Editing custom content

Beyond read-only inspection, the utility lets you edit selected resources and import bitmap images for use in objects, walls, and floors. Custom items downloaded from sites such as the SimLouvre Yahoo Group could be vetted and tweaked before being dropped into the player's downloads folder.

Version 1.1.7 changes

This release adds multisprite DGRP display, drawing code for DGRP version 20000, object-oriented drawgroup and sprite routines, and improved handling of multi-tile object coordinates. The OS X build is Carbonised and requires Carbon 1.2.5 or later.

System requirements

Runs on PowerPC Macs from OS 8.5 through 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard, via Rosetta on Intel hardware). It will not launch under OS 10.7 Lion or later, since Apple removed Rosetta and the Carbon PowerPC runtime in that release.