Thanks to sansal's tool I was finally able to view some 3d objects. I downloaded the latest version and also obtained a tool called wings3d (apparently derivative of wing3d). It's at
http://www.wings3d.com/. I ran it and imported the items I extracted from the dat file and got them to appear. It also seems easy to manipulate them, although I haven't tried reimporting yet. I don't know if you guys are already using other programs to edit 3d models, but just in case you want something easy to use and free...