How to read sparse binary file WITHOUT matfile

I am running 2011a and I need a work around for the "matfile" function, which is only included in 2011b and greater.

I have a sparse matrix A.mat. I want to be able to read in data from the matrix by specific indicies. In 2011b I would do:

matObjA = matfile('A.mat', 'Writable', true)
idx = 2304982; %some specific row index that I want to read 
rowOfData = matObjA.A(idx, :);

Can I do this in 2011a using fopen, fseek, fread, or something else? The problem is that I personally don't know how to parse a binary data file that represents a sparse matrix.

[Oren]

Exactly what i'm looking for.