I recommend you download the LiveCD of Icaros Desktop and give it a spin. It's without a doubt the best AROS distro out there. It can run 68K apps as if they're native programs and as for speed, it will run circles around an X1000 or a PegII if you have a modern x86 CPU. But like MOS, OS4 and OSX, the hardware support is quite narrow in scope. If you want to try it on a PC, make sure you have an Intel or Nvidia graphics card or you'll have to fallback on VESA mode graphics. The list of supported network cards is also quite small so internet access may not be available with the hardware you have on hand but Icaros is being improved all the time. The latest update added NTFS files support but was withdrawn after some people reported problems. Hopefully that will be fixed soon. You can get Icaros here:
http://vmwaros.blogspot.com/
