Most people don't need to care about image formats and just need to follow Setting up and starting Cuis Smalltalk. But if you have specific needs or are interested in this, keep reading.
The Squeak Smalltalk family (of which Cuis is part) has used several image formats over the years. See ImageFormat. Cuis offers broad compatibility with available VMs and various tradeoffs between performance and VM complexity.
There are currently three image formats that are being actively supported in Cuis. Checking this with the ckformat utility, we have this in Cuis:
lewis@lewis-Gazelle-Pro:~/squeak/Cuis/Cuis-Smalltalk-Dev$ for i in *.image; do echo $i ckformat $i
; done
Cuis5.0-3196.image 68021
Cuis5.0-3196-32.image 6521
Cuis5.0-3196-v3.image 6505