Advice for a newbie?

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

• Get your system recapped as soon as you get one. Acill and many others here on the forums can help you with that. 20+ year old capacitors are almost certainly leaking, which can cause a host of problems (google it)
• Read the forums extensively. Pretty much any question you might have has been asked a time or six. ;)
• Get an Indivision if you plan on connecting to modern monitors
• Use a CF card instead of a hard drive
• WHDLoad is great for making old games run from hard drives
• AmigaKit and many other online sites still sell new expansion boards and other kit
• There was a recent Kickstarter campaign to make entirely new A1200 cases.  At some point in the TBD future, there may be new motherboards produced, as well
• Big Book of Amiga Hardware and Amiga Resource CX are other good sites to learn more about hardware and expansions
• Certain models of PCMCIA network cards (including WiFi) can be used with an A1200

Welcome, and have fun! :)

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

PS - you're going to be spending a lot of money on hardware if you want to be able to play Quake, even at minimum settings. While I would never want to discourage anyone from pushing old hardware to its limits, if you just want to play Quake, specifically, use an emulator (WinUAE, etc.).

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

I even heard of a port of firefox to amiga os and that's pretty sweet for something this old (I'm running tenfourfox on my old 2004 ibook g4 and that's pretty neat too)

Timberwolf.  No longer being developed.  Again, you're going to have  to spend a heck of a lot of money to run that on a classic system:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timberwolf_(web_browser)

This is a debatable topic, again just IMHO Chris's version of NetSurf is the most advanced browser for classic systems, but it's slooow and needs a lot of memory.  Ibrowse is probably the best balance of speed & compatibility (I use that term "compatibility" pretty loosely, as you're not going to be updating your Facebook from it, or anything like that).  I've found it's mostly good for reading news sites and downloading from Aminet.  It hasn't been updated in over 10 years but occasionally a whisper comes up about some kind of update for it.

As for modern screens, I was thinking of looking around for an amiga monitor, unless they're not worth the price?

Not to me, but some people swear by 'em, especially for retro gaming.  I guess if you like using a flickery 13" screen and pretending like it's 1992 all over again, have at it.  LOL.  But if you want to run modern applications at high resolutions, they're not going to cut the mustard.  

You might want to think about this plan a bit and try to figure out which way you want to go.  Do you want a stock or mildly expanded system, with an old school monitor for retro gaming, or do you want a "pimped out" system capable of playing Quake, Timberwolf, etc.?

Also, what's your budget?  Not trying to pick on you but you mention "minimum wage" and "barely being above welfare"... a high-end classic Amiga system can easily run $1,000+, depending on the parts you chose for it.  Maybe an A500 or A600 would be cheaper for you, and with those you'll have the option of using one of the new Vampire accelerators, which give improved graphics and speeds exceeding even the 68060.  No idea when (or if) the Vampire 1200 will ever come out.

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Just curious but are PowerUP accelerator boards any good?

Of course they are, for what they do.  They're also ridiculously $$$$$.  Make sure you know what you're getting, and what you want to do with your Amiga, if you decide to start down that road.  A bit of googling will help get you started:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerUP_(accelerator)

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

But what do they do exactly? What are their upsides and downsides?

They allow you to run software written for them.  I would've thought this would be self-explanatory.    Amiga Amp, M.A.M.E., and many other applications as well as datatypes (WarpDT's) have versions specifically written to take advantage of them.  But the software has to be specifically written to take advantage of the PPC processor, so before you ask, no, it's not going to speed up some hardware-banging game from 1987.   :roflmao:

Here's a list to get you started:  http://aminet.net/search?query=PPC

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Do these require an OS other than workbench?

Have you been reading the links?  3.9 or 4.1 Classic should work fine with a properly equipped PPC Amiga.  You'll need a lot of RAM if you want to run 4.1 Classic.

http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=1222

Also earlier in the thread, wifi was mentioned. I have an old Xircom RBE-100 Ethernet PC card. would that work with the amiga 1200?

Does it have a Prism2 chipset?  You need a card that's compatible with this:

http://aminet.net/package/driver/net/prism2v2

See the guide included in the archive for details of compatible cards.