Successful (but ugly) upgrade from 0.72 to nightly

I finally managed to upgrade from 0.72 to something new. I picked the latest available nightly version, which was 20/2/2004
Regular upgrade didn’t work, and creating a new database with fresh install didn’t give me an option to recover my old entries. I ended up doing the following to make it work:
-I edited the wp-config-sample file with the info for the existing database. The prefix for the tables was ?b2? in my old version, so I changed “wp_” to “b2”
-However, in the actual database, some tables had the prefix, and some did not. In phpmysql I selected the tables without prefix, I clicked the ?operations? tab, and chose ?rename table to? to manually edit those names to start with ?b2?, and keeping the rest of the name intact. (My existing database had the following tables: b2categories, b2comments, b2posts, b2users, linkcategories, links, optiongroup_options, optiongroups, options, optiontypes, optionvalues. After I changed the names, they ALL started with b2.)
-Then I ran wp-admin/upgrade.php
It gave me one error when I was done:
SQL/DB Error:
[You have an error in your SQL syntax. Check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ?https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos8/TextIntlSvcs/Te%5D
INSERT INTO b2options (option_id, option_name, option_type, option_value, option_description, option_admin_level) VALUES (93, ?blog_charset?, 3, ?utf-8?, ?Your blog?s charset (here?s a list of possible charsets)?,
-I ignored this, and tried to log in. wp-admin/login.php gave a 404, but wp-admin/post.php let me log in with my existing name and password. Yay.
So, this works, but it’s ugly and messy because:
-I have that one error that I blatantly ignored.
-I don’t know which of the tables that I kept from my old version are actually used in the new version. I couldn’t run upgrade.php WITHOUT first changing the names. It gave me lots and lots of errors, all involving the fact that I didn’t have b2options, or b2links. That’s what gave me the idea to rename my existing tables to match those names. But I renamed ALL of them, and I now I don’t know if I’m actually USING all of them.
-also ugly because I still have things called b2xxxx. I mean, I could have just used “wp_” as prefix, and renamed everything to wp_xxxx, since I was renaming anyway. (Tip for anyone trying this method: rename everything to “wp_” so it will be correct for any future upgrades.)
So, anyway, this took me a few days, but I have my old entries, and I can post. I still need to get my old layouts and other pages back up though, so I’m going to close the site until I’m done.