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The American Girls: Dress Designer

From PCGamingWiki, the wiki about fixing PC games
Revision as of 11:45, 16 June 2019 by Garrbot (talk | contribs) (updated template usage)
The American Girls: Dress Designer
The American Girls: Dress Designer cover
Developers
Mattel Interactive
Release dates
Windows 1999
The American Girls: Dress Designer on Wikipedia
American Girl
The American Girls Premiere 1997
The American Girls: Dress Designer 1999
Your Notebook (with help from Amelia) 1999
American Girl: Julie Saves The Eagles 2007
American Girl: Mia Goes for Great 2008
American Girl: Kit - A Tree House of My Own 2008

Key points

The game has issues on modern versions of Windows. See Issues fixed.
Does not scale at all with higher resolutions; Dress Designer is fixed to run at 640x480, and playing it at 800x600 or higher introduces black borders around the screen.
While the game remains playable, Dress Designer appears to be poorly optimised when it comes to CPU utilisation, as it consumes too much processor time even on a modern systen.

General information

MobyGames page
American Girl Playthings (fan site for collectors and AG enthusiasts)

Availability

Source DRM Notes Keys OS
Retail
Disc check (requires the CD/DVD in the drive to play)
Used copies of the game can be found on eBay and other online sellers.
Windows

Essential improvements

Run the game straight from the hard drive

Instructions[1]
  1. Go to the configuration file(s) location.
  2. Open Dress Designer.ini.
  3. Set cdpath=Bundles
  4. Save Dress Designer.ini.
  5. Insert the game disc, then copy the Bundles folder on the disc to the installation folder.

Game data

Configuration file(s) location

System Location
Windows <path-to-game>\Dress Designer.ini[Note 1]

Save game data location

System Location
Windows <path-to-game>\Data[Note 1]

Video settings

Template:Video settings

Windowed

Instructions[2]
  1. Go to the configuration file(s) location.
  2. Open Dress Designer.ini.
  3. Set fsenabled=0

Input settings

Template:Input settings

Audio settings

Template:Audio settings

Localizations

Language UI Audio Sub Notes
English

Issues fixed

Windows NT popup window crash fix

The dreaded error message that shows up whenever the player attempts to quit the game or bring up the options menu. See this GIF for an animated demo of the error.
The dreaded error message that shows up whenever the player attempts to quit the game or bring up the options menu. See this GIF for an animated demo of the error.
Install the unofficial AG Dress Designer patch[citation needed]

Notes

This fixes the "An error occurred while opening a window" message when the game is played on an NT-based Windows OS, e.g. Windows 7, Vista or 10. Interestingly, the aforementioned error also occurs on operating systems as far back as Windows NT 4.0, an OS released a few years before the game. It can be presumed that the business-oriented nature of NT at the time accounted for why support for it was overlooked,[3][4] only to end up being met with negative reviews on Amazon from irate parents whose children were unable to play the game on their computers.[5][6]
You can also download the patch via this mirror site or here.

Audio stutters on newer operating systems

Use the latest QuickTime Alternative runtime instead of the bundled QuickTime codec.

Game does not fill the entire screen on higher resolutions

Use Lossless Scaling along with windowed mode.

Notes

This isn't without its drawbacks, however: clicking on Exit or Print results in the main game window scaling back to its normal size. Also, you'll have to launch the tool and activate it every time you play the game as well.

Other information

API

Technical specs Supported Notes
DirectDraw 7.0
Executable 32-bit 64-bit Notes
Windows

Middleware

Middleware Notes
Cutscenes QuickTime Earlier runtime versions may cause the audio to stutter; see above fix for details

System requirements

Windows
Minimum
Operating system (OS) 95
Processor (CPU) Intel Pentium 166 MHz
System memory (RAM) 32 MB
Hard disk drive (HDD) 75 MB
Video card (GPU) 16-bit colour

Notes

  1. 1.0 1.1 When running this game without elevated privileges (Run as administrator option), write operations against a location below %PROGRAMFILES%, %PROGRAMDATA%, or %WINDIR% might be redirected to %LOCALAPPDATA%\VirtualStore on Windows Vista and later (more details).

References