Extracting tardist / inst packages

[Elf]

Someone in Discord recently asked after extracting tardist / inst packages.

The tardist portion of this is easy, as it is basically a standard tar archive, which can be untarred (tar -xvf), yielding multiple inst "sw" packages.

I have had mixed success extracting inst packages using software from:

• misuchiru03's swextract: https://github.com/misuchiru03/swextract
• camthesaxman's irixswextract: https://gist.github.com/camthesaxman/dcc60d98f152b4fed32dfc18d7246551

Of the two, irixswextract was more reliable, although it did need some occasional modification, particularly when dealing with older inst files. Unfortunately I did not preserve those modifications, but if I had to do it again I would probably just write my own tool

Hopefully this helps!