How do I resolve installation of programs not compatible with OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion)?

Question

Is there anyway to resolve this incompatibility without having to downgrade my OS to a 10.6 (or lower) or replacing my CD (containing the incompatible program)?

Answer 1

If your machine already had Snow Leopard before and you have space space available at the bottom of your boot hard drive (SSD if you have enough space) and you have the 10.6 installer disks, then you can create a Snow Leopard partition on the machine, provided BootCamp/Windows hasn't taken it yet.
If you don't have the 10.6 disks, then you can research this user tip about getting the correct 10.6 disks and if the 10.6 white ones will work for you or not.
How to reformat a used Mac
1: First backup your users file and make a bootable clone of your present OS X drive. This is bootable and you can use it to repair, erase and reverse clone if something messes up.
Most commonly used backup methods
2: Open Disk Utility click on your boot drive and the partition tab. Attempt to create a second partition below your main OS X one and notice the size it will allow, if it's not good enough for your needs (like you need more of the available free space) then exit without applying the change.
See this user tip:
BootCamp: "This disc can not be partitioned/impossible to move files."
How to safely defrag a Mac's hard drive
3: If you have a hard drive, use the Disk Utility > Erase Free Space > Zero on the boot drive and wait for it to complete, it will map off any bad sectors that will prevent formatting or installing of OS X Snow Leopard.
4: Once you have created a second partition below your first one (named:  Snow Kitty), you want to change it's format to OS X Extended Journaled and apply.
5: Next is the fun part, you follow these instructions below to install Snow Leopard (+ Rosetta for PPC apps), but you apply them to the Snow Kitty partition and you DON'T erase the entire drive or you will lose Mountain Lion partitions as well etc.
How to erase and install Snow Leopard 10.6
6: Optionally you apply the software tweaks and such here to maximize Snow Leopard performance
For Snow Leopard Speed Freaks
7: Oh, to boot into Snow Leopard or  Lion you hold the option/alt key down for Startup Manager and select which one you want.
If your always in Snow Leopard or the other Lion, you can set either as a Startup Disk in System Preferences and it will tell the firmware which one to boot from so no need to hold the option key down.
Now there is a hack over at MacRumors that will run a virtual machine of Snow Leopard in later OS X versions.
This sort of explains virtual machines and what they do.
Windows in BootCamp or Virtual Machine?
Hope that works for you here's a free Cs2 for Snow Leopard.
https://www.adobe.com/downloads/cs2_downloads/index.html