I've just released a tool I wrote, in its released version 1.0 it's intended to extract Vertex-, face- and mapping-data from a 3ds file and throw the data into individual binary files, which I use in my projects.
The release is intended as a source release because it is likely people will want to put the data in their own format, which i've tried to make as straight forward as possible. There is the binary version that I use myself.