Greetings PZ, and congratz on an interesting piece of hardware!
Calling yourself a "Newbie", I`ll treat your Q`s in a n00b-manner.
"i wont lie and say i understand everything you told me - but i have registered a copy of
WHDLOAD and will soon down load it. i will also order amiga forever - what is it?"
First off, WHDLoad is an excellent way of making the A1200
play all those old games without switching off AGA-gfx etc.
It does so by emulation.
Some AGA-shoot`em-ups work better without WHDLoad though.
As you may, or may not, recall, the Amiga came in different
shapes and sizes, culminating in the A1200 and A4000T?
Those came with a tad bit faster CPU`s and better gfx,
making some old games harder to get to play ball.
Now, AmigaForever is a complete package for emulating an
Amiga-environment (Workbench, different hardware, gfx-card)
on a fairly modern pc.
Like the one I`m using right now.
It`s a windows-program package complete with Kickstart-ROM`s etc.
All I use is WinUAE atm.
That`s basically what you need to emulate Amiga.
(Together with Workbench and a copy of your A1200 KS-ROM.)
Beside me is a desktop C=Amiga1200 though, pretty much like
yours.
You could go 2 ways in expanding your A1200 (which I believe was your
initial question).
1. You could build it into a tower-model.
Some companies sells ready-made custom models, I`m not well
traversed in that area though.
This would give you access to some modern hardware among other perks.
2. My solution was to expand on the current desktop design.
I added an acceleratorboard (trapdoor under A1200).
It`s a Blizzard with a 030cpu, 68882 maths co-processor,
and most importantly 64Mb RAM.
I upgraded the Kickstart3.0 ROM to 3.1.
I added a larger hard-drive together with an IDE-splitter
to which i could connect an external CD-RW.
I bought AmigaOS3.9.
I then got a *compatible* PCMCIA-networkcard getting www etc.
Some PCMCIA memory cards could be used as fast harddrive solutions
as mentioned somewhere in the thread.
Now there`s hardly more room to expand on without fitting
it into a tower
"so i dug out my old commodore 64
"
Gee, I wish I still had mine, all my girlfriend do is
use my Amiga for gfx-apps and games.
The best of 2009 to you!
