Deleting Time Machine backups left over from old computer

Hey, so I got a new MBP awhile ago to replace my old MB, and am using the same HD for Time Machine backups. For awhile I wanted to keep the old backups around, but now that I’m fine without them, they’re just taking up space, and they’re not automatically deleting as the HD fills up, it seems that it only deletes backups of the computer that it’s backing up when it needs the space. I know usually deleting Time Machine backups through the Finder is a really bad idea, but since I don’t have the old MB to do it through the Time Machine interface any more, it’s the only way. Would I be OK to do it that way, since I want to delete all the backups from that Mac? Or would I risk screwing up the backups of my MBP?

I dunno, I know generally it’s not a good idea to delete stuff from the TMB drive from inside Finder. I made the mistake of trying to delete a specific backup once that way, and suddenly HUGE amounts of data were being deleted. I assume it’s because of the way Time Machine hard links to files and everything so that by deleting files from one backup, I was deleting those same files from many backups at once. The right way to delete a specific backup is in Time Machine. I figured in this case it might be OK since I’m deleting all of the backups for that computer, but I just wanted to make sure it won’t screw anything up.