Since I had a little trouble getting this working and google wasn't much help, thought I'd post this here for others.

Technically the game "works" without doing anything, it doesn't crash and there are no graphical errors etc. The problem is that when the GA window has focus, CPU usage shoots through the roof and lots of things run at a snails pace (i.e. it takes about 30 secs to go from the main menu to the options screen). This only seems to happen whenever certain graphical effects are used. Text rendering and menus in-game are fine, but the game instantly slows down whenever a characters sprite is changed (e.g. from smiling to laughing) or moved as there's a fade-in/out effect.

Cause: From what I can tell the game makes use of which is pretty ancient now and has been depreciated since DirectX 7. From DirectX 10 onwards, more and more DirectDraw calls that used to be hardware accelerated are emulated in software which is why it "works" but slowly. I'm guessing the emulation is slightly different and it's sampling input or something too fast which means it rarely gets time to actually draw the screen.

Workaround: I found that running the game windowed and simply clicking something outside the game so that the game no longer had focus returned it to being speedy. Clicking outside the game and back again whenever it went slow got old fast however

Fix: Thankfully it's very easy; get and install the June 2010 DirectX 9 User run times from here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download ... px?id=8109 This was the last version to support DirectDraw in hardware and works fine in Windows 8 with all supported graphics cards (i.e. anything card with drivers that support DirectDraw).