Seth Michael Larson: A(nimal Cros)SCII

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:

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

¡¿ÄÀÁÂÃȦÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎ
ÏĐÑÒÓÔÕÖØÙÚÛÜβ?à
 !"áâ%&'()~♥,-.𝅘𝅥𝅮
0123456789:🌢<=>?
@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO
PQRSTUVWXYZã💢äȧ_
çabcdefghijklmno
pqrstuvwxyzèéêë 
 ìíîï·?ñòóôõöøùú
-ûüýÿþÝ|§ªº∥ᵧ³²¹
¯¬Ææ„»«☀☁☂꩜☃⚞⚟/∞
⭕❌☐△+⚡♂♀⚘★☠😯😄😞😠😃
×÷🔨🎀✉💰🐾🐶🐱🐰🐦🐮🐷␤🐟🪲
;#  🔑“”‘’Œœᵉ  \\

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!