Hi Steve,
one idea came to mind hearing that about some *.DAT files. Way back in the first half of the 1990's I had to do with a ISAM DB called BTrieve and I'm
pretty sure that there were also some *.DAT files involved. I think it had to do with some files containing the "true" data and other files contained the indexes (*.IDX).
Googling turned up this website that has a tool on it called BtSearch that is able to analyze BTrieve DAT files (Caution: Commercial product!):
BtSearch on www.nssdd.com[
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Maybe you can google some on your own like: BTrieve DAT convert
Modification:
A quote from this site:
The Architecture of BTrieve[
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"The API likewise remained backwards compatible, with only one feature (split files to separate media) being dropped. At one point, Btrieve's former CEO Ron Harris stated that "The version 1.0 API is still supported in version 6.15, and we're going to keep it forever!" (Kyle, pg 11)."
Sounds promising if your files really are BTrieve files that you'll still be able to read them.
End Modification
Best of luck!
Regards,
Manfred