The Client/Server Runtime Subsystem is responsible for Win32 console windows on Windows NT family of operating systems, although since Windows 7 it offloads most of its work to a separate executable, conhost.exe.
Further changes came in Windows 8, with the Conhost.exe process now being spawned by the console-based process rather than from Csrss.exe as in Windows 7
Under Windows NT and Windows CE, the screen buffer uses four bytes per character cell: two bytes for character code, two bytes for attributes.
The character is then encoded in a 16-bit subset of Unicode (UCS-2).
For backward compatibility, the console APIs exist in two versions: Unicode and non-Unicode.
The non-Unicode versions of APIs can use code page switching to extend the range of displayed characters (but only if TrueType fonts are used for the console window, thereby extending the range of codes available).
Even UTF-8 is available as "code page 65001" (displaying only from the UCS-2 subset of full Unicode).

As of the Windows 10 October 2018 update, the Windows Console has full Unicode support.
The Client/Server Runtime Subsystem is responsible for Win32 console windows on Windows NT family of operating systems, although since Windows 7 it offloads most of its work to a separate executable, conhost.exe. Further changes came in Windows 8, with the Conhost.exe process now being spawned by the console-based process rather than from Csrss.exe as in Windows 7
Under Windows NT and Windows CE, the screen buffer uses four bytes per character cell: two bytes for character code, two bytes for attributes. The character is then encoded in a 16-bit subset of Unicode (UCS-2). For backward compatibility, the console APIs exist in two versions: Unicode and non-Unicode. The non-Unicode versions of APIs can use code page switching to extend the range of displayed characters (but only if TrueType fonts are used for the console window, thereby extending the range of codes available). Even UTF-8 is available as "code page 65001" (displaying only from the UCS-2 subset of full Unicode).
As of the Windows 10 October 2018 update, the Windows Console has full Unicode support.
Windows Console