working on very old songs

Hi

I have just bought cubase 8 pro and waiting for the delivery. I have a bunch of songs in.all formats dating 1995-2003 from cubasis and VST I want to revisit them.

Question 1 I think I have the answer from searching - I need to download cubase version SX3 from the FTP, load songs into that and save as .cpr to be able to load them in new cubase. So my subsequent questions I have (and maybe there is a recommended guide to this?) are:

a) I used a lot of random plugins back in the day. I guess or hope that many of these’ usage would be superseded by the modern and built-in plugins but anyway is there a way to

  1. list all plugins used in a song and where they were used
  2. list all settings used in a plugin (even if not found on current machine) so I can plug in those values into built in cubase plugins as a first step to working on them?

b) I remember back in the day something about losing automation control when changing to the new cubase format, was this or rather is this true?

Thanks in advance!