Console capabilities

[MagicAlex]

I have a an old Powerbook G3 with Gentoo for PPC running on it. Lately I've been doing some work with ncurses so I can make a nifty GUI for one of my class's assignments. It seems that the Powerbook cannot display the symbol characters that curses uses to make boxes, and I was wondering if this is something I can change. But I'm not really sure what enables a computer to do this in the first place. My x86 desktop can do it, but it runs a lot more software than my Powerbook. Is it something that needs to be built into the kernel? Is there a configuration option I need to enable? Or do I simply need to install a missing consolefont?