Complete noob :)

Hello guys, new old Amiga user here Forum is wonderful, I learned bunch of stuff, but still having some trouble so I was hoping for some help. Like most of people, back in the days I had Amiga 500, had a lot of fun with it, great games, created my first music with Octamed, did some drawing with DPaint, animations with Disney animation studio etc. but most important, which is a big problem for me now, I never got to know workbench as it deserves. I already tempered a bit with ClassicWB (through WinUae), it is ingenious package, got to know it to some extent, but not quite well. First of all, I don't want to bore you to death with basic questions so if there is some tutorial for noobs, or a website that condenses all that I should know in dummy friendly manner, that would be great!
Second, I recently bought A1200 in Elbox tower, basic machine, no expansions, and I'm thinking adding some kick to old girl. I'm considering ACA1230 or ACA1231 (what are differences between those two cards apart 1230 having higher clock), would any of those be a good investment, or I should looking for something more powerful, OS 3.9 wise (my budget would be around 300 euros)? What about CD/DVD rom, will any work or there is some particular ones that I would have to look for? Why are mediator boards so expensive, are there not some cheaper solutions for RTG?
That's all for now, sorry for my bad english. Thanks very much in advance.

[fishyfish]

Firstly, your English is fine. Had you not mentioned your "bad English" I wouldnt have realised English wasnt your native language

I hope someone proves me wrong, but so far as I know there's no great all in one resource for teaching people what's useful to know for the current 68k amiga user. Searching and reading threads in sites such as this is probably the best option.

Im sure there's other threads made by people in a similar situation to yourself, so hopefully you wont have to read too many threads
There's one I started myself recently where I asked some questions that may contain information that's useful to you (http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=65686).
It probably wont cover all your questions, but may contain some useful information for you.

As for the ACA cards, I dont thik there's any 1230's available (apart from 2nd hand), so it may make your choice a little easier. I have neither card, but if my memory serves me correctly the biggest difference was RAM timing being tighter on the 1231, resulting in better performance at same clock speed in some situations. I may be wrong here, but I think that was the main difference (Besides the 1231 only being available a 42mhz).

As for optical drives, any should work so long as its ide and you have the correct cables SCSI drives can also work, but obviously you'll need to have hadware with a scsi controller

In regards to OS3.9, it is a little heavier than 3.0/3.1, and 3.5, but not a lot once OS3.0/3.1 has the enhancements added that OS3.9 contains. To this day people still debate whether its better to just enhance OS3.0/3.1 themselves, or to use OS3.5/3.9 as a base, but end of the day its mostly just a matter of taste. Personally I like OS3.9 and use it on my amithlon box, although I use OS3.1 on my a1200..... not because I think its better for a real amiga, but simply because I like to build my system from the ground up myself, and OS3.1 is a lot more basic, so it suits better.

In regards to RTG, there's really not many options other than a mediator these days. There's also the G-Rex (mine cost me something tiny like $30 brand new some years ago(although only 'cos they were being cleared out)), but it requires a blizzard ppc accelerator whereas Mediator can also be used with 680x0 accelerators.
The only other option I can think of is an ATEO bus, but theyre quite rare, and only available second hand, not to mention they use ISA and have very little hardware support (Pixel64 I believe is the only available graphics card there).

Hopefully this answers some of your questions and feel free to ask if you have any more.

Thanks for answers Fishyfish. I'm bit embarrassed to say, but I'm trying to understand the very basics of how Workbench works, over the years windows made a bit dumb . For example, I don't know what are tooltypes, what does rexx do, how to properly change startup sequence, that sort of thing.. That would be a lot of questions, so that's why I was thinking if there may be some sort of tutorial for complete noobs

Thanks for clearing my dilemma about ACA accelerators, 1231 it shall be. I dug a little bit on eBay, 040 and 060 accelerators have astronomical prices, way out of my reach.

I'll stick with the ClassicWB 3.1 for now, till I get familiar with things, but I would love to customize it from scratch on my own.

Again, thank you very much for taking time answering me, I'll read as much of the forum threads as I can.

[Lord Aga]

Whoa, a neighbor Amigan !
Pozdrav brate !
We shall truly rise again
What monitor are you using ?

[cosmicfrog]

don`t be scared to ask questions, espeialy if you have already tried to find the answer, we have all been there.

personaly don`t see much point to adding a cd to an amiga as there are other ways to get files to and from the machine which are better and faster

you have a grexx !! sell it to someone that has a working Blizzy PPC and use the cash to get ya upgrades

[fgh]

For some good manuals, have a look here.

[daxb]

For basic information I would also recommend Amiga DOS, Amiga Workbench, Amiga ARexx, ... books. Not bad to have some nearby. Also on Aminet you will find a lot of useful stuff.