As explained above, some versions of Mac OS too impose rather silly hardware requirements that are designed more help Apple avoid product support calls than to help Macintosh users. A well known example of this is Mac OS 8. In several places in Mac OS 8 code, there are intentional checks to make sure that the code is running on a 68040 Quadra type computer, despite the fact that the 68030 and 68040 chips are virtual clones of each other and Mac OS 8 runs just fine on 68030 machines! Why Apple chose to outdate its Macintosh II series and Macintosh LC series computers is beyond me, but for over 3 years now it's been documented on the web how to load Mac OS 8 on a 68030 machine. There is a utility called WishIWere which does this, and one of several pages that describes the trick is this one:
http://www.lowendmac.com/tech/8on030.shtml
Oddly enough, Apple has relaxed some of the requirements since Mac OS 8 was released, with certain utilities (such as Drive Setup) no longer doing these artificial tests. Whereas the Mac OS 8.0 version of Drive Setup will not run on 68030 machines, the version that bundles with Mac OS 8.1 and 8.5 does, as does the latest Drive Setup 1.9 release currently up on Apple's web site. I think they realized there were being jerks.
SoftMac users: SoftMac automatically supports the running of Mac OS 8 with 68030 Macintosh ROMs. You do not need to take any additional steps or install WishIWere to run Mac OS 8 provided that you are using at least 512K or larger Macintosh ROMs. In SoftMac 2000 8.0 we also added a fix that allows the Mac OS 8.0 version of Drive Setup to function correctly with the 68030 ROMs.
As far as Mac OS X, I have so far only heard rumors of people getting Mac OS X Public Beta to run on 64 meg PowerPC 604 based Macintosh computers. If someone would like to forward me more information about this, I will post the information here.
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