I thought it was the Joysticks that held the infromation.. I remember the CH Fightr Stick gameport model had a 2 MB memory module in it... so once uploaded to the stick it stayed there until one removed it / over wrote it, did a REBOOT of the stick ( Ack Ack taught me they did away with the REBOOT feature when CH went to USB ).....
I too, have all the old DOS, speedkeys, JSETUP, etc legacy/DOS prgrams if anyone needs any of them.......
I used my CH HOTAS analog stuff up until around August of 2008 and then gave them all away to AH Players in need ( had "3" complete CH HOTAS setups analog/gameport type )...... only recall one person saying they was unable to get gameport CH stuff to work on winXP or newer OS's.....
I have found CH Manager is just as programmable as speed Keys was...... just got to RTFM
........ although AH works just fine with the newer USB stuff, without using CH's Control Manager being loaded up and running in the back ground
also, as long as you can keymap your old analog CH stuff using speedkeys or boot to DOS and use the DOS batch file/program thingy ( this can be found at CH Hangars forums ) you can use gameport to USB adapters and use your controllers in Aces high just the way you always did in other sims.... least I have done this before on one of my PC's that had no gameport on it........
hope this helps...