i have just aquired a 1200 and i need help

[Daedalus]

Two ways:
1) If you have a Workbench floppy, boot from that, go into the Workbench:System/ drawer and double-click on Shell or CLI to open a shell window. Type "CPU" and press enter and it will tell you exactly what you have.

2) Turn the A1200 over (Be careful!). Open the trapdoor on the bottom gently with a flat screwdriver or similar. If there's a circuit board in there, you have some form of add-on. Looking at the chips and/or the name printed on the board will tell you which one it is. If it's empty, you just have the standard 14MHz 68020 that all 1200s are fitted with.

[Daedalus]

Well, there aren't any versions other than the ones already mentioned. You can run 3.0 and 3.1 on yours without adding anything, and by adding a modest accelerator card and a CD-ROM drive you can run 3.5 or 3.9. TBH, for old games you don't need 3.5 or 3.9 and would be best off just sticking with whatever it has and getting a small accelerator/RAM card.

[Daedalus]

Ah, without a hard drive you won't be able to use 3.5 or 3.9 either. On a floppy sustem, storage is on a separate floppy. Workbench consists of a set of 5 or 6 disks:

Workbench 3.0
Extras 3.0
Fonts
Storage
Locale
and an optional Install disk.

You'll need to copy the PC0 file from the Storage:DOSDrivers/ directory to the Workbench:Devs/DOSDrivers directory and reboot to make the driver available.

[Daedalus]

Oh, excellent! Though be careful if you only have the 3.0 ROMs - some software may fall over with mixed versions of the OS. Yes, you can replace the icons and modify pretty much anything about the way it looks by installing patches, but be warned - they'll take up more memory when they're running, and with only the standard 2MB it'll disappear fast

Have a look on aminet.net for NewIcons and Birdie. NewIcons extends the icon system to allow for better icons (of which there are vast amounts), and Birdie lets you change the appearance of window borders, gadgets and so on. MagicWB is an alternative system of nicer icons.

If the drive came preinstalled, it may even have some of these installed! A drive I bought years ago came with MagicWB already installed.