You might be able to build on the techniques from [Reading 32 bit signed ieee 754 floating points from a binary file with python?][1]. I don't have any physics caches lying around to experiment upon, but hopefully this will get you started. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6286033/reading-32-bit-signed-ieee-754-floating-points-from-a-binary-file-with-python "Reading 32 bit signed ieee 754 floating points from a binary file with python?"