Welcome to the board. This is an old post and lots have changed since it was active. There has been a bunch of us who have joined the vintage diving ranks and the vintage activity on the board has expanded a lot. This vintage section is only a year or so old. There is a lot of information in the section on your questions.
To more directly answer your question, you really do not need the pony or the LP ports. Vintage diving requires more attention to your weighting and proper breath control. Unless you are diving with a lot of exposure protection (and then modern wetsuits as opposed to vintage ones- they are different) you really do not need a BC. The average persons lung buoyancy is 6-10 lbs, quite a lot. If you properly weight you can easily deal with the few pounds of weight shift from air usage. For example, I dive 4lbs of lead when diving warm salt water (0 in warm fresh) with no wet suit, just a fleece lined skin which is neutrally buoyant. At the beginning of the dive I am about 2 lbs heavy (AL-80 tank) which puts me dead on neutral at 1500psi and about 2 lbs light at the end of the dive. 2 lbs either way is very easy for me to deal with, after a few dives I really did not notice it, it has become natural to me. Once you stop relying on a BC to correct your weighting issues and get the feel for diving without one it's fairly easy. If you need lots of exposure protection then things do change and then is the time to consider some form of BC. Here is an exercise for you, go dive with your normal gear. First, do a very good weight check with your final weighting at 2 lbs heavy with a full tank. This should make you dead on neutral at 1500 psi. Make sure you have all the air out of your BC and get as much air out of your equipment (inside your wetsuit) as possible. Now do the dive but make an effort to not touch your BC inflator unless you just have to, adding air ends the vintage training. Concentrate on using your lungs as your buoyancy control. Use deep slow breaths, varying the depth, length and cadance to tweek your buoyancy. Diving should be slow and graceful, not fast and brute force. You may need to swim down a few feet to get yourself going but that is fairly common, there was an old saying- Swim down, swim around and swim back up...there is a lot of truth in it. Since I started vintage diving, I rarely touch my inflator even when I am diving modern (dry suit is an exception
) . Check this link out, starting on page 7. It is of a vintage dive in April of this year in the Bahamas. The photos with a wreck in the background were at about 90 ft, most of us had no BC at all. A lot of the faces are active members of this board.
Vintage Double Hose • View topic - SAND DOG VI in the Bahamas
It is also very improtant you understand the workings of a DH reg. Not only do they clear differently, it is important that they be properly worn on the body. Unlike single hose regs that are pretty much imune to postioning, a DH must be worn low between the shoulder blades and as close to the body as possible, otherwise they will breath very badly. A lot of modern BCs will not allow you to attach a tank low enough or keep the reg close enough to your back. Also expect changes in the breathing resistance when you change position. A properly operating DH reg should breath normally when you are in a horizonal position, more difficult when head down, very easy when head up and it WILL freeflow some when you roll onto your back.
Hope that helps. Please do look over the entire Vintage section, there is tons of information to be had and welcome to vintage diving.