Getting somewhere...
Took me some time, but now I understand the tristrip data format well enough to display triangles for the whole scene - here is a screenie. Theoretically textures and normals are now working as well (the normals used in the screenie weren't loaded from the file but computed from the triangle data), I just have to implement it (but I know where to read the data from in the file).
Next steps are support for animated models (they still look somewhat horked because I need to take joint data into account for them, what I'm not doing at the moment [and I don't understand the joint data format at the moment]) and support for models with more than one texture.