New (old) Amigan Here

[Karlos]

Welcome aboard

My advice would be to expand the A1200 a bit, at the very least, some extra RAM on a trapdoor expansion and an internal hard disk. That would allow you to install the operating system and, using the excellent WHDLoad package (available on aminet), lots of games.

A fairly minimal list of what I'd consider essential (some of which you may already have)

1) Hard disk
2) Kickstart 3.1 ROMs / Workbench 3.1
3) PCMCIA friendly 4MB trapdoor ram expansion or (preferably) a 68030 class accelerator board with as much RAM as it will take.
4) PCMCIA network card and TCP/IP stack (AmiTCP, or if using 3.9 genesis)
5) Beefier power supply (if you are going to use an accelerator card and HD, this is basically a must).

If you already have a LAN, (3) is very useful since you can essentially forget all that tedious transferring of files to floppies to get them installed.

Nice to have, but less than essential IMHO
68040/68060 class accelerator board. Much more grunt than an 030, but there can be a backwards-compatibility trade-off.
Flickerfixer/scandoubler
OS3.5 or 3.9

If money is no object, then a tower conversion and PCI expansion system is a nice way to go.

[Karlos]

Thanks all for the great advice.  
 
I do have a hard drive but waiting on a converter for the video as I am planning to use the Amiga on my flat panel TV.  I did look into hooking it up using the VGA port but the only scan doubler I could find was the Indivision AGA for the Amiga 1200 but it seems no one has them.  I'll use it on the composite for now until I can find one.

AmigaKit not got any in stock?  
 

I was thinking of expanding it with the CPU/RAM board but is it needed with OS 3.1?

Your basic, unexpanded A1200 will benefit regardless of which OS version you have. At the absolute minimum, I would recommend a trapdoor ram expansion, which will roughly double the performance of the machine. The reason being that the 68020, unlike the 68000, is capable of accessing RAM every bus cycle and when running from Chip RAM only is typically forced to miss every second one at least (which was never a big problem for the 68000 as it was only capable of accessing the RAM once in every 2 cycles). Adding Fast RAM to the system allows the CPU to run unimpeded.

You can fit a maximum of 4MB to the trapdoor without affecting PCMCIA, or 8MB but you then lose access to the PCMCIA address region.

A faster CPU board has it's own local memory arrangement and capacities tend to be limited by the number of memory slots more than anything.

Also, is OS 3.9 a worthwhile upgrade?  Will my system still run some of those old Amiga 500 games made in the mid to late 80's if I add a 040/060 expansion card and upgrade the OS to 3.9?  Games aren't all I'll do it on but that is part of the reason I bought my Amiga.
 
Thanks again!

It depends, really. If you do get a faster CPU board, compatibility is a bit of an issue but there is an installer suite called WHDLoad. This uses "clients" to install floppy based (and even HD installable) games that are also able to patch the game and adjust CPU options for improved compatibility. They usually allow you to quit back to the OS too. Even without going for a CPU board, WHDLoad is a must for classic gaming