Just Bought a "New" Amiga 500

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The A500 Hard Drive attachments plug into the edge connector on the left side of the unit.  The A590 is the Commodore one, although there are others made by different companies.  The A570 CD-Rom also plugs into the same connector.  If you're serious about upgrading it, you're better off looking for an A1200 as they're the cheapest to upgrade, and have an IDE connector onboard (just throw a 2.5" drive in) but if all you're doing is playing games, the 500 is fine :-)

Kickstart 3.1 allows you to run OS 3.1 - 3.9, and has much more support for things like TCP/IP stacks, other applications and browsers, etc.  If you're thinking of putting an accelerator in, and using games off the HDD, 3.1 is the way to go.  However, it's up to you whether you do it, 90% of games run fine on 1.3 :-)

As for hardware, eBay is usually your best bet.  Places like AmigaKit are good, but the most stuff usually goes on eBay, and it's usually more likely to work out than somewhere like Amibench (an Amiga 'trading post' site).  Hope that helps  :-D

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OCS/ECS games are indeed playable on an A1200, but it also plays AGA games as well.  There are incompatibilities with a few games and KS 3.1, but those are usually fixed by patches, etc.  However, as you said, it's easy to emulate an Amiga on a PC, and for games, the A500 is still King, it just means you need disks  :-)

That card should boost your ram to 9mb, but beware - it uses the same slot as the A500 HDD and the A500 CD-ROM.  If neither of them matter, go for it, but I don't know whether you will get much use out of that 9mb without a hard drive.  You can get something along the lines of an ADIde interface that sits under the CPU (IIRC) and gives you an IDE port, that may be the best thing to look out for.  Apart from that, I'm not sure.  But if you're only playing games, I don't even know if you'll need the ram expansion, not that many OCS/ECS games require more ram as far as I know.

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Sorry, didn't see that had a through port!  :lol:  Shouldn't be a problem then, but it will take up a lot of room on your desk, just something to think about.
The 68000 socket is the CPU, yes.  As for the Clockport adaptor, I don't know whether it's worth it.  The Clockport does have quite a few uses - mainly USB cards, Soundcards, and the like, but I doubt you'll get any use at all out of it under 1.3, or with a base 500, it just won't handle it very well.  Probably better to spend the money on something else, perhaps an accelerator of some sort (though they are hard to find for the 500)