To put it bluntly, I have a long-term project in mind that involves recreating and modernizing some of the hair/head, body and accessories/props from The Sims 1 into The Sims 4's art style for use in that game, and to do that I'd like to extract the original models from TS1 to use as live references. Sadly, I can't use The Sims Creator for this due to the program's sheer age making switching between it and other apps a nightmare, coupled with the fact many default skins with "accessories" won't display properly in Creator in the first place.

Does anyone know a way to convert the original models (I'm assuming either the CMX or SKN files, but will admit I'm not sure which if either) into a format Blender can open, or at least a format that has compatibility with another freeware app that I can install and functionally run on a modern PC? I don't care if I have to go convert the files through 24 different versions of 12 different programs to make it happen, if it's possible please tell me! Even if I can't import them in a way that keeps the textures mapped, just having the actual mesh data would go a long way here.

For the record, I already tried SKN2OBJ from Kelahn.com, which was supposed to convert SKN to OBJ, but it seems the UI doesn't function correctly on modern computers so all I could do was Open SKNs to save in the program's personal project format or import OBJs to re-save as SKN files, both options that were utterly useless to me.

This tutorial says that you can import the meshes into Milkshape 3D, but I'm not a mesher, so I don't know anything about it. I haven't read the tutorial, but it looks like a place to start, maybe.

There's also a meshing tutorial on the Wayback Machine that uses Milkshape 3D.

When you save a SKN in SKNtoOBJ as the program's SPJ file, it also saves it as OBJ and MTL! It's just not well communicated, either on the website or within the program itself.