Animal CrosSCII

What is the character encoding for Animal Crossing? This page details all the characters that are allowed for player names, town names, and passwords in Animal Crossing for the GameCube. A much larger character set was used for writing mail and communication.

Each character was internally represented as a value between 0x00 and 0xFF which is the same size as ASCII, thus me naming this encoding “Animal CrosSCII”. The characters between 0xD5 and 0xDE are only used in the EU version. 0xDF to 0xFF are unused.

The names of the characters (and descriptions when ambiguous) were sourced from the Animal Crossing decompilation project. I've mapped each character to the best of my ability back to Unicode and collected them in a table below. Notice how there's tons of overlapping character encodings between “Animal CrosSII” and ASCII between 0x20 and 0x7A.

And here's the Unicode characters laid out into a “square”:

︎¡︎¿︎Ä︎À︎Á︎Â︎Ã︎Ȧ︎Ç︎È︎É︎Ê︎Ë︎Ì︎Í︎Î︎
︎Ï︎Đ︎Ñ︎Ò︎Ó︎Ô︎Õ︎Ö︎Ø︎Ù︎Ú︎Û︎Ü︎β︎?︎à︎
︎ ︎!︎"︎á︎â︎%︎&︎'︎(︎)︎~︎♥︎,︎-︎.︎𝅘𝅥𝅮︎
︎0︎1︎2︎3︎4︎5︎6︎7︎8︎9︎:︎🌢︎<︎=︎>︎?︎
︎@︎A︎B︎C︎D︎E︎F︎G︎H︎I︎J︎K︎L︎M︎N︎O︎
︎P︎Q︎R︎S︎T︎U︎V︎W︎X︎Y︎Z︎ã︎💢︎ä︎ȧ︎_︎
︎ç︎a︎b︎c︎d︎e︎f︎g︎h︎i︎j︎k︎l︎m︎n︎o︎
︎p︎q︎r︎s︎t︎u︎v︎w︎x︎y︎z︎è︎é︎ê︎ë︎ ︎
︎ ︎ì︎í︎î︎ï︎·︎?︎ñ︎ò︎ó︎ô︎õ︎ö︎ø︎ù︎ú︎
︎-︎û︎ü︎ý︎ÿ︎þ︎Ý︎|︎§︎ª︎º︎∥︎ᵧ︎³︎²︎¹︎
︎¯︎¬︎Æ︎æ︎„︎»︎«︎☀︎☁︎☂︎꩜︎☃︎⚞︎⚟︎/︎∞︎
︎⭕︎❌︎☐︎△︎+︎⚡︎♂︎♀︎⚘︎★︎☠︎😯︎😄︎😞︎😠︎😃︎
︎×︎÷︎🔨︎🎀︎✉︎💰︎🐾︎🐶︎🐱︎🐰︎🐦︎🐮︎🐷︎␤︎🐟︎🪲︎
︎;︎#︎ ︎ ︎🔑︎“︎”︎‘︎’︎Œ︎œ︎ᵉ︎ ︎ ︎\

I wasn't able to find Unicode equivalents to some of the characters and a few others (marked with ??? in the table). If you're able to find Unicode characters for the missing ones please send me an email or pull request. Time to brush up on Animalese!

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