How to play Diablo III in a Virtual Machine?

Question

I saw a lot of people asking the same question in other forums (yes, i've googled it a little bit), and some people answered that of course is possible to play it in a Virtual Machine but only using VMWare, some other people said that isn't possible even in VMWare, and the people who said that it's possible and also who said they have virtualized Diablo III doesn't gave proofs.

I know that VirtualBox application does not offer GPU support, the Video Card is completelly virtualized and only has 256 MB, so is not possible to run/play Diablo III (i've tried it), now I'm trying to play in VMWare Workstation 'cause it have physical access to the host graphics and GPU acceleration and I've read that Diablo III can be played with VMWare, well, I've installed VMWare guest tools pack, and I've installed and updated Diablo III from the Battle.Net app, but when I try to run the game it seems to load but it only shows a black screen after the loading screen (but I can hear the music foreground game and I can see the Diablo III custom cursor on the black screen)

My host OS is Windows 8.1 x64, guest OS is Windows 7 x86, with 4 GB of virtual memory, I have an nVidia GTX 650 video card, and I've tried to run Diablo III Reaper of souls.

I've installed the last DirectX and the .NET Framework 4.5 on the guest OS, I've also tried to specify different compatibility checks on the game executable, but nothing changed, I still can't see/play the game.

So... if someone is really able to play Diablo III on a VirtualMachine please illustrate me with the steps to reproduce it with all the details such as the OS, the OS arquitecture, the given virtual memory, libraries/software installed, diablo3 or diablo3-Reaper of souls etc... ...everything.

Thankyou for read.

Answer 1

I was testing and playing with the config file (desperately), and in my specific case the solution was to use Windowed Mode, so I can't run at Full-Screen but Windowed mode works perfectly.

Just open (or copy from Host OS) the config file D3Prefs.txt stored at %USERPROFILE%\Documents\Diablo III and change this value

DisplayModeWindowMode "0"

From False (0) to True (1):

DisplayModeWindowMode "1"

And no other things are needed like installing drivers or anything else, just change that setting in the VM to run the game in an isolated Window.

For some, setting vsync on (from 0 to 1) also corrects the issue and allows full screen support.

PS: I've tested it in VMWare and don't expect that this could work in VirtualBox.

PS2: Not even the game installation is required - the entire Diablo III folder can be copied from Host OS and it should work perfectly fine (at least in my case).

Answer 2

Actually i have managed to let it run in vmwareplayer... My laptop is a lenovo g500 with i5 3rd gen. 8gb ram 2gb graphic card with win8 running. I started a win7 vm with 3vcores and 5gb ram 3d acceleration enabled and vmware tools ... After some d3prefs customization i found on a website i could run d3 with mid performance and like 40fps ... Just my 2 cents.