Haha, that's great! We have that situation in our main product line where I work. At the center of the system is 30 year old Z8000 assembly code that gets run

Haha, that's great! We have that situation in our main product line where I work. At the center of the system is 30 year old Z8000 assembly code that gets run through a translator during the build process to produce C code which gets compiled and linked into the (PowerPC) executable. There aren't that many folks left that know Z8K assembly, so not many people can begin to wade into that code and fix long-standing bugs. Everyone else builds wrappers so they don't have to actually get too close to the translated assembly code. But since they don't quite understand the code they're avoiding, these wrappers tend to be fragile and prone to odd corner-case bugs themselves.