Is there a free EV3 simulator (virtual machine) for the Mac OS? I recently saw this question on a virtual EV3 machine. From the video, I felt that this software will be great. However, I don't have the budget needed to buy a licence. Is there any alternative to this system?
You could try TRIKstudio: http://blog.trikset.com/p/trik-studio.html

This allows you to program a robot based on the LEGO EV3 setup, however while the application itself has English, French and Russian translations, most of the online help is only in Russian.