Brood war mining worker micro

Solution 1:

Before SC2, you had to tell each worker to begin mining manually. Simply setting a rally point on a mineral patch did not get the job done. Basically, you get used to setting a rally point in an area right next to the town hall building where workers aren't constantly pathing back and forth. That way, when the worker is done, you can go select it quickly and have it start mining. There was no 'idle worker' button in SC1, unfortunately, so that shortcut won't work.

As for workers per patch, it's roughly the same as SC2: You get diminishing returns when you go from 2 workers per patch to 3 workers per patch, and using more than 3 workers per patch is not worth it.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is a guide to BroodWar for SC2 players on Team Liquid's site for the differences between SC:BW and SC2. If you're going to be playing SC:BW a lot, check it out. It covers the worker and building selection items you mentioned as well as a few other points.

Solution 2:

For at least the early and mid game you should set a location hotkey to each base. Quickly jump back to base regularly with the hotkey to select all your workers and right click on resources.

The workers should rally to a place next to the base, but sadly for zergs you have no choice but to rally at the same place with all your attacking units.

In the very early game you can manually make sure workers mine most efficiently by selecting them and moving them one by one to empty patches but the effort is usually not worth it as the game progresses.

Telling workers to go mine is pretty much mindless repetition but one of the hardest parts of macro. In SC2 macro scales effortlessly, it's basically as easy to macro on 3 bases as on 1, but in bw it's literally 3 times harder to macro on 3 bases, so newer players tend to fall apart faster. People who like BW like the skill differentiation there.

On Minerals per patch, there is a definitive thread about it:

http://teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=430971