I read about isses with the original game in a few individual threads (choppy fps in windows 8) and thought I'd share my current solution to the problem.
It seems that in Win8 "Direct Draw" has ben depreciated and support for it is really poor as a result.
There are a few projects out there that attempt to fix this by providing wrapper dlls of ddraw.dll - I tried a few of them but so far only one provided good results on my system which is this one:
https://github.com/jarikomppa/dxwrapper
(Download the binary package http://iki.fi/sol/zip/dxwrapper20130524.zip and extract the contents into the same folder your timeshock!.exe resides in.)
Ironically it's not even supposed to do anything other than create a log file of the ddraw calls and then pass it on to DirectX.
"DirectX 1-7 wrapper project for making old games run on new hardware. This code is only a "pass-through" wrapper, which can be used as boilerplate for actual fixes (or a dx->opengl wrapper or whatnot).
The wrapper is a full pass-through wrapper; it doesn't do anything special, just takes in calls from the application, writes the event to a log, and passes the arguments to the real DirectX."
So this is not ideal from a player's perspective as you end up with a fast growing log file in the TS directory which you will want to delete afterwards but somehow it solves (almost) all my problems in TS (in order to get the best results I have to disable page-flipping in the TS video options and just to be sure I also created a nvidia driver profile for Timeshock that forces v-sync off for the game).
It's still not entirely smooth all of the time which I think might be a result of the video options test screen in TS suggestion that it has detected 72hz refresh rate while my screen actually runs at 60hz.
I have tried a few more possible fixes that did not solve my problems but might be worth a try on other machines:
1. Disable direct draw hardware acceleration:
Add the following string value (with the correct path to your game executable) to your registry in order to disable direct draw hardware acceleration for the game (my result is good performance but tons of visual errors)
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers]
"C:\Games\Timeshock!.exe"="$ DWM8And16BitMitigation Layer_ForceDirectDrawEmulation"
2. Try a different wrapper such as:
ddwarpper: http://bitpatch.com/ddwrapper.html (works but performance does not improve for me)
DDHack: https://code.google.com/p/ddhack/ (does not work for me at all)
DXGL: http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=33134 (haven't actually tried it myself)
WineD3D: http://www.nongnu.org/wined3d/ (works but the game acts funny, slows down and as soon as the ball enters the crystal it never comes out again)
-> go to the old version directory 1.1.38 (the most recent one does not contain ddraw.dll) and grab: http://nongnu.mirrors.hostinginnederlan ... ined3d.exe
HOWEVER do NOT run wined3d.exe but extract the contents of it with a tool like 7zip to a temp folder and copy "ddraw.dll", "libwine.dll" and "wined3d.dll" from \$SYSDIR\ to your Timeshock! installation folder.
If you have found other wrappers or solutions that work please share!