Bourbon 26 system requirements

No pitch on this one. Just what Bourbon 26 needs and what it does.

System requirements

Intel Macs aren't supported. The whole thing is built around Apple Silicon and the Metal graphics path.

What Set Up Everything installs

One button, fourteen components, in this order:

1. Rosetta 2, Apple's x86 translation, needed by parts of the toolchain
2. Homebrew, the package manager used to fetch several pieces
3. MoltenVK, Vulkan running on top of Metal
4. Wine Staging 11, the main Windows compatibility runtime
5. CrossOver source Wine, a second runtime in its own prefix for fragile 32 bit Windows tools
6. A Wine prefix, the Windows environment Steam lives in
7. DXVK, DirectX 9, 10 and 11 to Vulkan
8. VKD3D, DirectX 12 to Vulkan
9. Game Porting Toolkit 3, Apple's D3DMetal path, tracked through Homebrew with its own update button
10. Steam client, installed and ready to sign into
11. DXMT, DirectX 10 and 11 straight to Metal
12. Steam UI shim, works around how the current Steam client renders under Wine
13. Game runtimes, Visual C++ and DirectX helper libraries
14. Core Windows fonts

Every one of those gets its own status row afterward with individual install, repair, update, disable and remove buttons. Nothing is a black box you have to nuke and redo.

Optional extras

• Game Porting Toolkit 4 beta. Bourbon can open Apple's download page and import the DMG for you. Marked experimental, and GPTK 3 stays the default.
• OS Experience. An optional QEMU based add-on for running full Windows 11 ARM64 or Bourbon Linux virtual machines. Separate from the Wine stack, and not gaming grade, since there's no GPU passthrough.

What you can run

• Steam games. Sign into your own account, download your own library.
• Standalone Windows software. .exe and .msi files, including through Finder's Open With menu.
• Curated Windows apps. A built in catalog that installs from each project's official source.
• Remote Play. Xbox Cloud, GeForce NOW, Amazon Luna and Boosteroid in native windows, plus Chiaki for PS4 and PS5 and Moonlight for your own PC, Linux box or Mac.

Data and storage

Bourbon keeps its runtime data in ~/Library/Application Support/Bourbon. Wine prefixes, Steam data, support files, logs, configuration. You can move that folder to another drive and repair the paths afterward. External volumes under /Volumes can be mapped into Wine drive letters so Steam can build libraries on external storage.

Licensing

One payment of $29.99. Nothing expires. The version you buy stays supported with maintenance updates, meaning fixes for macOS and Steam changes plus ongoing compatibility work. New features land in the next major version, which is a separate optional purchase you're never forced into.