Sounds like your heading towards one of two solutions.

1. Find a copy of DBase IV and write a converter. I actually have a copy buried on 3-1/2 floppies somewhere before moving to clipper then to fox. Can't say I recall the 1000 fields per record though.

2. Get out the old hex editor, decipher the table structure and write a converter using VB, VFP, etc. Since the DBF format is ASCII and the DBF table header is well documented it really should not be to hard to do.