Advice please for converting legacy P1.5 app to P3.5 to run on Raspberry Pi (or run 1.5 on Pi)

Without any code or some more clues, any advice would be hypothetical (you have more clues at your disposal so will know better what the issues are). I would advise against your JRE6 idea, RaspberryPI4 might at a pinch work with jdk8 but all recent distros support jdk11+. Indeed I have had good success with ManjaroARM(64 bit) on the RaspberryPI4.