Well lately I've been working hard on what I dub the Kajar Engine, which is a reimplementation of the Chrono Cross game engine similar to how there's open 3rd party engines of Doom, Morrowind, etc. It occurred to me while I was writing to code for parsing the model files that perhaps I could make a subproject: an extension for Assimp that gives it the ability to load these models. Assimp is a C/C++ code library that can import/export a couple dozen 3D model formats (FBX, OBJ, Blender, etc etc) that I was delighted to find out has an API for writing additional format loaders.
I'm currently using both the Chrono Cross MDL wiki page and MDL Blender import Python script as a reference, along with learning how to extend Assimp by studying its Valve model import code. I might do the .MESH file format as well. That looks simpler.
and Wait- there's a Chrono Cross Mdl wiki page!? WHERE.