Yes, most of the time such spaghetti code projects don't have any tests either. You may have to take the time to develop them, working at a high level first and then developing more specific tests. Hopefully you can use some coverage tools to determine how much of the code you are exercising. Again this isn't always feasible. Once you have a decent set of tests that pass on the original code base, you can start making changes.

Working with old code is tough, no real magic to work around that.