Can’t they use vectors and shit nowadays, yo? That’s how them kids tell me it gonna be

Why does it matter if the cartridges are colored? Just a waste of ink.

During the E3 Roundtable

Whoa, where did you read the music is fully orchestrated? I didn’t hear that anywhere.

Well, they do use spaces within the context of the games, actually. But since ASCII is latin alphabet only, so no, they don’t use that. Maybe using JIS X 0213 and whatever’s the standard for Korean, but the sheer number of kana required (There are 164 katakana by unicode standards, and double that for needing hiragana too)… We’ll see how it comes down to managing it, though. It won’t be the majority of the game, but it could be bigger than you might expect is all I’m speculating. 🙂

I don’t know actually. I have no idea how the 3DS development kit works. However, since it is a closed system, and with Nintendo being natively Japanese, it is indeed possible that they use ASCII (or UTF-8) and something else for Japanese characters. They still could have designed their own ‘smart’ designs with space in mind.
However, even if Japanese characters take up more space, keep in mind that Japanese words are usually shorters than a latin equivalent and that they don’t feature spaces.

Does that account for the fact that it’s going to HAVE to use Unicode in order to use Kana and Hangul for Japanese and Korean languages, respectively? They’re not going to be able to do that in ASCII. I’m only loosely aware of how letter encoding works, but it’s gonna be more than one byte per letter because ASCII simply doesn’t work. Probably won’t change things too much, but the 1 byte = 1 letter only works if you presume ASCII, right? Granted, if you go up to Unicode 32, that’s 4 bytes per letter, right? Is it possible to use ASCII for the latin alphabet languages and Unicode for the two non-latin ones?

Oh okay, that makes a lot more sense now.