Getting old build tools to work is really awesome. I went through a similar process getting an old version of HPHPc (the PHP-to-c compiler precursor to HHVM) to work[1]. I found Docker to be incredibly invaluable for doing this in a reproducible way, especially when the system state needed to be changed in complex ways or dependencies needed to be tweaked.
A small example is that the test cases only work right if English, German, Finnish and French locales are available and if the system timezone is set to "America/Los_Angeles".