downloaded Appleworks 6.2.9 for Mac Updater-2.sim but when i try to open the file i receive the message "legacy image should be updated". what does this mean and/or entail?

Mavericks is not recognizing the .smi extension - on my Mac it thinks it's a RealPlayer document. You are not going to be able to do anything with this - it requires AppleWorks to be present to be updated, and you can't run AppleWorks on Mavericks (other than by the rather roundabout process of installing Snow Leopard Server in Parallels and installing AppleWorks on that, as described here).