collation

I wanted to ask what should zen carts collation tables be? because all of my tables for some reason are type MyISAM and collation latin1_general_ci

In v1.3.x, by default the table TYPE is MyISAM, and the collation is latin1_general_ci, based on the latin1 character set.

is latin the usual character set? note this was a fresh install.

predominantly yes

if you're upgrading from a prior version and all your tables are utf8 then you should probably be using utf8 instead of latin1

but for a new install of a new site, on a site that doesn't need non-latin characters, the default of latin1 should be fine