Yes, you can do this for free. Everything Bourbon automates is open source, and this guide maps the free path honestly — including the hours it asks for in exchange.
Sort of, and it's worth knowing what free actually buys you before you spend a weekend finding out.
Short answer up front: the free options each solve one piece of the problem. Bourbon 26 solves all of it for $29.99 once, which is less than most people spend on a single game. Here's the comparison.
The free routes
Apple's Game Porting Toolkit
Free, straight from Apple, and the D3DMetal renderer inside it is excellent. Catch is it's an evaluation tool for developers: Terminal commands, no interface, no library, one renderer with no fallback when a game doesn't suit it. Bourbon installs GPTK as one of its fourteen components and adds the other four renderers around it, so you get Apple's technology without the developer workflow.
Whisky, CrossOver's free trial, and the rest
Whisky was the friendly free option and it's covered below. CrossOver has a trial rather than a free tier, so it's a paid product with a look first. Everything else in this space is either a front end over the same open source pieces or a command line workflow with no interface at all.
Whisky
Used to be the friendly free pick and it earned that. Development stopped, which matters a lot here because macOS, Steam, Wine and the graphics layers all keep moving. An install you already have might limp along a while. Nobody's fixing it when it stops, and Bourbon is where most Whisky users have landed since.
Steam's Mac catalog
Thousands of games have real macOS builds and need no translation at all, over 24,000 titles in our compatibility list. Bourbon checks this for you and sends those games straight to the Mac Steam client, so you get the native build automatically instead of accidentally translating something that didn't need it.
What free actually gets you
The free options all share the same gaps. None of them install Steam for you. None of them ship a second Wine runtime for fragile 32 bit software. None of them pick a renderer per game. And none of them do anything at all for the games that can't be translated, so you're still opening a separate app to stream Fortnite.
GPTK gives you one renderer. Whisky gives you a bottle and a dead maintenance story. Neither gives you a library that just launches.
No tool gets you into anti-cheat games locally, free or paid, because macOS can't load Windows kernel drivers. The difference is that Bourbon streams them for you from the same app. The free options just leave you stuck.
What $29.99 adds
All fourteen components installed in one pass including Steam and its UI shim. Five renderers instead of one, assigned per game from a database of 24,000 plus titles. A second Wine runtime for the awkward 32 bit stuff. Remote Play for the games translation can't touch. And somebody tracking Wine, Steam and macOS changes so it keeps working next year.
It's one payment against a free tool that's either unmaintained or wasn't built for players in the first place. For most people that's a short conversation.
Being straight with you
Check Steam's Mac catalog first, since native builds beat translation every time and Bourbon routes you to them automatically anyway. For everything else, $29.99 once gets you the whole stack set up, five renderers, and streaming for the games that can't be translated. Look your games up first, that part's free.
Search your games, free Buy Bourbon 26, $29.99