VMware Fusion 6.0.3 runs RealFlight 6 demo.
Please report back how it goes.
It seems that everyone who reports success with Realflight in a VM never says another word after that.... it makes one wonder.
I had a Win8 VM and Fusion setup already so I gave the demo a try.
Success! The RealFlight 6 demo works. It says it is using "high" settings and something about "at the expense of graphics quality" I played around with a few models (using the keyboard) destroyed them in spectacular fashion and it looked fine for what I want. The fans on the laptop go crazy pretty quick, unless I'm using an external monitor. That's something I've notice with my laptop and other applications though.
Setup:
I have the recent (late 2013) 15" MacBook Pro Retina. 16GB of RAM 2.6Ghz i7 CPU. It has only the Intel 5200 integrated graphics. This is an odd configuration, yes I'm sure I don't have the nVidia discrete graphics.
The VM has 4GB of RAM, 2 cores (you don't usually want to use a multi-CPU VM unless you have good reasons, I occasionally run things in this VM that really benefits from >1 cores). 3D acceleration turned on. The OS is Win 8.1. I just installed DirectX 9 from Microsoft's site. I run the VM full-screen, but the demo was running in a full-size window in the VM (so I could access the RF menu, remember, this is my first time using the program)
Ok, both Phoenix and RF 6 demos worked for me in Fusion. I'm not a gamer so maybe I'm not critical enough of the gfx performance, but it looked more than good enough at the default setting the demo selected without the frame rate stuttering. Based on this, I'm convinced I should be able to get either RF7 or Phoenix to work. There is still the USB dongle. I haven't run across a USB device that failed in VM in a long time, but I know it's possible.
Of course native performance would be better, but this is good enough for me and much more convenient. If I decide to go with RF7, I'll put up a
separate post describing the setup. I'd like to profile the performance in more detail to know how much RAM is really required and see how it runs on a single virtual core. I can also answer whatever questions people have about running in Fusion if they need help. I'm a long time VMware user and really familiar with their products.
UPDATE: The How-to on Fusion post is
here