Could you please explain what you did?
Anyway, my situation is as follows, I'am running a dual boot system with Windows 8 and Fedora 18 and basically every game I play from time to time (Hearts of Iron, Rising Storm, Silent Hunter Series, ...) runs fine with Windows 8, except Dangerous Waters, which is sadly one of my favorites. However, I don't want to downgrade to Windows 7, so I tried two things:
1. Run Dangerous Waters in Virtual Box w/ Windows XP installed in it. I activated Direct3D support (you have to boot the XP guest in safe mode in order to do this), installed Dangerous Waters and I got it to run, albeit terribly slow (~20 fps at max), which I expected. My Hardware is a Core i7 2600k, 8gb Ram and a AMD HD6950 Card. So if you can live with a low framerate (which I can't) or have stronger hardware, you can certainly try that approach, but don't expect too much.
2. I mentioned the Fedora 18 dualboot, so I decided to give it a shot with Linux and Wine. I know this might not be an alternative for people that don't have a dual boot system running and aren't willing to do a downgrade to Windows 7 (let alone installing a whole new OS
), but maybe this helps the one or another. So what I did:
1. Installed Wine from the package manager (eg. basically yum install wine)
2. Installed Steam with wine (worked out of the box)
3. Started Steam with wine, but no fonts where visible. Started Steam with wine Steam.exe -no-dwrite and fonts where there and crystal clear.
4. Installed Dangerous Waters normally through Steam and started it. And wow, *everything* worked out of the box (though I haven't tested multiplayer).
I spent at least 2-3 Hours for the Virtualbox approach and the Performance and overall experience was abysmal, the Fedora solution took me about 30 minutes, the most time went for downloading Dangerous Waters through steam. I tested this on my not-so-new Sandy Bridge Thinkpad with HD3000 and got ~40fps on insane setting and 90 otherwise, so the performance here is much, much better than in Virtualbox where I achieved 20fps with much better hardware.
So I you have a Linux Box around or a dual boot system, try it with Wine, it worked basically out of the box for me. Anyway, If there is a Win8 Solution, let me know, would be a little bit more comfortable