Cinderella’s Castle Designer

Genre: Childrens

Release Year: 2003

Developer: Disney Interactive Studios

Publisher: Disney Interactive Studios

Age Rating: Everyone

Playability Status: Perfect (virtual machine required)

Tested On: Windows 10 x64, Windows XP

Availability: Copyright retained - Out of print/unavailable

Do you have a little one who enjoys interior design? Give them something to do other than crayoning on the walls by letting them design the interior of a whole dream castle. Rather than portcullises, dungeons and iron maidens, the castles that Disney have in mind are altogether more welcoming, with ballrooms, gardens and lavish bedrooms. With the help of the fairy godmother and one of her subordinates, your child will be able to explore and decorate several dream castles, as well as find the missing gems to free Cinderella.

Installing and playing

This game doesn’t work in Windows 10 or 8 at all and simply crashes on startup, but will work perfectly in VMware Workstation Player running Windows XP. You can find a tutorial on setting up VMware Player here.

Once you have Windows XP on your virtual PC, install the game into your virtual machine as normal. You can then start the game from the Start menu shortcut. The game requires that the CD be in your computers optical drive while you play.

The game runs at a fixed 800×600 resolution, so if you want to play it full screen with minimal borders, you will need to drop your PCs desktop resolution (in the host OS) down to 800×600 before putting VMware Player into full-screen mode and launching the game. There are no other settings to tweak or configure. Remember you can skip the fairy godmother’s rambling at any time by pressing the space bar.

Save games for Cinderellas Castle Designer are stored in “C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Disney Interactive\Disney’s Cinderella’s Castle Designer”. That would be “C:\ProgramData\Disney Interactive\Disney’s Cinderella’s Castle Designer” if you were able to run the game on a more modern version of Windows.

Problems launching the game

If you’re unable to launch the game from the Start menu, then the games shortcut is probably broken. To fix this, perform the following steps. First of all, find the games short-cut on the Start menu and right click on it and choose “Properties”.

A properties window will now appear, locate the “Target” box and click on it, then press the “Home” key to go right to the start of the line.

Make sure that there is a quotation mark right at the beginning, as shown in the picture. Then, press the “End” key to go to the end of the line and make sure there is a quotation mark there too. Click on “Apply” and then “OK”. You should now be able to launch the game.

Screenshots

Click on any screenshot to enlarge it.

Choosing a castle to explore.

Every dining room needs a lion statue.

Can you submit a fix?

Know how to get this game running without using a Windows XP virtual machine? Help the community and let us know in the comments how you got it working.