I was messing with a cheap 2 Lamp F17T8 Ballast when i noticed it could start low wattage HPS and MH lamps, and it made me wonder if i could run Low wattage HPS or MH lamps off electronic fluorescent ballasts.

I know this might be a stupid question but i mostly want to know out of curiosity.

This can cause acoustic resonances in the arctube because of the high frequency.
Also: The lamp may be underdriven because of the low wattage of the ballast.

What if you were to wire an 2 lamp F32T8 ballast to overdrive one lamp and hook up an either a 50w HPS or MH lamp to it?

Still, acoustic resonance would occurs because of the HF operation, which can kill the lamp.

Electronic HID ballasts are not really like electronic fluorescent ones. With fluorescent, the higher the frequency (usually approx 20kHz), the less time the phosphor glow has time to decay to the point where flicker is no longer an issue. Fluorescent lamps can easily tolerate this as there is sufficient proof out there.

Now with HID, there is a resonance issue with high frequency which leads to a premature failure of the arc tube. Electronic HID ballasts have a low frequency square wave instead of high frequency. Usually the frequency is in the vicinity of 80-150 Hz (I think, others might want to correct this). The key part for flicker elimination is the waveform itself. Instead of a sinusoid wave which gradually increases to the maximum voltage and then gradually decreases to the zero and continues gradually to the maximum negative voltage, the square wave has maximum voltage and then suddenly maximum negative voltage and so on. The key is not a gradual increase/decrease (which translates to gradual intensity changes) but sudden changes in voltage, so the ON time of the arc is way longer than the OFF time. With sinusoid wave ballasts, the ON time is quite less than on square wave, which will make flicker more noticeable. The sinusoid wave does not have an OFF time long enough that the arc extinguishes to it can maintain it.

Magnetic ballasts of all types are all sinusoid wave ballasts because they use the same waveform as the mains frequency.

Thank you for the information, i was curious about what would happen if they were left on fluorescent ballasts and now i know.

I think that square wave current have no off period at all. If the voltage changes from + to - immediately, there is no period of 0V at all, unlike in sine wave, so the discharge is steadily on without any flickering.

Well, they do have an OFF period, only very, very short. It's like bouncing a ball on a hard surface. The ball's velocity (or speed) drops to zero before increasing again in the opposite direction.

I believe that the arc persistence keeps it lit during the very short time there is no current.

See the figures in this article. It explains it better than I can do in text only here.