Two years ago, before the official release of Mac OS X (the operating system most Mac computers run these days) that would work on Intel hardware and PowerPC hardware, there were people out there who dared to install developer releases on completely non-Apple hardware by using a software patch on the install disc.
This method of putting OS X on non-Apple hardware was not only buggy, but support for a lot of hardware was missing. To this day, it still only works on certain motherboards and certain processors with certain chipsets. But, I was one of these brave souls who tried it out – and I got OS X to work on both my generic brand AMD-64 laptop and my AMD-64 3200+ custom-built desktop that year.
Two of the major drawbacks to the methods available back then were that you had to do several newbie-unfriendly hacks to get graphics and sound working properly and to keep iTunes and other Rosetta-enabled apps from crashing, and the other drawback was that utilizing Software Update was always a big risk of completely crashing your system to an unusable state.
Nowadays though, hackers have taken Leopard, the newest version of the OS, and have a fairly sophisticated installer disc that requires almost no hacking and an easy install process that should be compatible with more hardware and actually works with Software Update! I may begin the process of building my very own Hackintosh as soon as I can afford some new hardware.